Variables Affecting Conformity Flashcards
What did Asch do with group size in his new experiment?
The number of people in a group was increased by Asch- he added more confederates thus increasing the size of the majority
What is unanimity?
The extent to which all members of a group agree. In Asch’s research, the majority was unanimous when all the confederates selected the same comparison line.
How did Asch adjust task difficulty in his new experiment?
Asch’s line judging task was more difficult when the comparison lines became closer in length.
What is the IV in Asch’s new experiment?
The variable affecting conformity, ie. Group size
Unanimity
Task difficulty
How did group size affect conformity?
Asch found that with one real participant and one confederate, conformity was low at 4% but rose to 13% with two confederates and 32% with three confederates, after three there was little difference.
-this suggests that most people are sensitive to others views and just 1 or 2 confederates was enough to sway opinion.
What is the evaluation for group sizes effect of Asch’s study?
Bond and smith 1996 supported the idea that adding extra conferderates had no effect on overall conformity rates . they performed a meta analysis of 133 Asch type studies for 17 countries and found that conformity peaks at around 4-5 confederates.
However research has also contradicted Asch’s findings on group size. Gerard et al 1968 found that conformity rates do rise as confederates are added. (The rate of increase declines at each individual confederate) +Pike and Laland 2010 reported that stickleback fish demonstrated conformity to feeding behaviour by showing a. Increased level of coping the demonstrated fish. However the rate of conformity decreased as the number of demonstrated fish increased.
Campbell and Fairey 1989 suggested that group size may have a different effect depending on the type of judgement being made and the motivation of the individual. When there is no objectively correct answer e.g: musical preferences, and the individual is concerned with fitting in, then the larger the majority the more likely they are to conform. Thus showing group size matters when the correct answer doesn’t exist. However when there is a correct answer the views of one of two will usually be sufficient for conformity.
What is the evaluation for unanimity in Asch’s new study?
Asch wanted to know if the presence of another non conforming person would impact the naive participants conformity levels, so he introduced a confederate who disagreed with the other confederates in one variation the confederate gave the right answer and in another he gave the wrong answer.
The genuine participant conformed less often in the presence of a dissenter. In the baseline study there was a conformity rate of 32% but this dropped to 5.5% with another non-conforming confederate who gave the right answer. The presence of non conforming confederates appears to give the participants to behave more independently. This was true even when the dissenter diagreed with the genuine participant and gave an incorrect answer, in this condition conformity dropped to 9%. This suggests that the influence of the majority depends to a large extent on the majority being unanimous.
What is the evaluation for task difficulty in Asch’s new experiment?
Asch made the line judging task more difficult by making the comparison lines similar in length and closer to the length of the standard line making the answer less obvious.
As task difficulty increased so did conformity.may be due to ambiguity increasing and so in these circumstances the individuals will look look to others for guidance as to what the correct answer is. This suggests that informational social influence plays a greater role when the task becomes difficult.
Lucas et al 2006 asked their participants to solve easy and hard maths questions, they found that participants conformed more when the problems were harder, which supports Asch. - however in Lucas et al study conformity was found to be more complicated as participants who had more confidence in their maths ability were less likely to conform on hard tasks compared to those who had low confidence in their maths ability.
