Variables Affecting Conformity

Question 1

What was the aim of Asch’s study?

Answer 1

Asch wanted to examine the extent to which social pressure from a majority could affect a person to conform

Question 2

Describe the procedure of Asch’s study

Answer 2

• Participants (123 American male undergraduates) were shown 1 ‘standard line’ and then 3 ‘comparison lines’. 1 of the 3 was the same length as the standard line and they were asked to match 1 with it.
• Each naïve participant was tested individually with a group of 6 to 8 confederates, and weren’t aware the others were confederates
• Confederates gave the right answers but then all started to give the same wrong answer. Each participant took part in 18 trials and on 12 ‘critical trials’, confederates gave the wrong answers.

Question 3

Describe the findings of Asch’s study

Answer 3

• Naïve participants gave a wrong answer 36.8% of the time. Overall, 25% of participants didn’t conform on any trial, while 75% conformed at least once.
• The ‘Asch effect’ has been used to describe this result - the extent to which participants conform even when the situation is unambiguous

Question 4

After Asch’s study, what were the reasons participants said they conformed for?

Answer 4

After interviewing participants Asch found they conformed for 1 of 3 reasons:
- distortion of perception (a small of number of participants came to see the lines in the same way as the majority
- distortion of judgement (they were doubtful of their own judgement)
- distortion of action (most continued to privately think differently from the group but changed their public answer to avoid disapproval)

Question 5

Describe Asch’s findings of group size as a variable affecting conformity

Answer 5

• Asch found little conformity when the majority was 1 or 2 confederates. However, with a majority of 3 conforming responses jumped up to 30%.
• Further increases in the size of the majority didn’t increase conformity substantially, indicating that the size of majority is important but only up to a point.

Question 6

Describe Asch’s findings of unanimity of the majority as a variable affecting conformity

Answer 6

• In Asch original study, confederates unanimously gave the same wrong answer. But when the real participant was given support of another participant or a confederate, conformity levels dropped to just 5.5%
• In the condition where the lone ‘dissenter’ gave a different answer from the majority and the true answer, conformity rates dropped to 9%.

Question 7

Describe the difficulty of the task as a variable affecting conformity

Answer 7

In a variation, Asch made the differences between the line lengths much smaller, so the answer was less obvious, in this condition the level of conformity increased.

Question 8

Give evaluation for variables affecting conformity (historical validity)

Answer 8

• Asch’s study took place when conformity was important in the US, which means it may lack historical validity. As it was a strong anti-communist period where people were scared to not conform.
• Years later, Perrin and Spencer tried to repeat Asch’s study in the UK. In their initial study, there was 1 conforming answer out of nearly 400 trials. However, where youths on probation were participants and probation officers as confederates, there were similar levels of conformity to Asch’s study.
• Suggests conformity is more likely if the perceived costs of not conforming are high, which would’ve been the case during the McCarthy era in the US.

Question 9

Give evaluation for variables affecting conformity (effect of group size)

Answer 9

• Bond suggests conformity studies have used a limited range of majority.
• Asch concluded that a majority size of 3 was sufficient for maximal influence and therefore subsequent studies have used 3 as the majority size. Bond points out that no studies other than Asch have used a majority size greater than 9, and in other studies the majority was usually between 2 and 4.
• Suggests we know little about the effect of larger majority sizes on conformity

Question 10

Give evaluation for variables affecting conformity (independent behaviour)

Answer 10

• It may be independent behaviour rather than conformity being showed in Asch’s study.
• In Asch’s study, in two-thirds of the trials the participants stuck to their original judgement despite the majority expressing a different view.
• So rather than showing humans to be overly conformists, his study showed a tendency for participants to stick to what they believed to be the correct answer, their independent behaviour.

Question 11

Give evaluation for variables affecting conformity (confederates)

Answer 11

• A problem was the confederates in Asch’s study could’ve acted unconvincingly when giving wrong answer, posing a problem for the validity of the study
• Mori and Arai made participants wear glasses with polarising filters to overcome this. 3 wore identical glasses and 1 wore one with a different filter. This meant only 1 participant matched a different comparison line to the standard line. For females, results closely matched those of original study.
• Suggests that the confederates in the original study had acted convincingly, reinforcing the validity of Asch’s findings