Variables affecting conformity

Question 1

Which three variables affect Conformity?

Answer 1

• Group Size
• Unanimity
• Task Difficulty

Question 2

What is Unanimity?

Answer 2

• The extent to which all members of a group agree (how many people agree).

Question 3

What did Asch find when he changed the Group Size in his experiment?

Answer 3

• With one real participant and one confederate, conformity was 4%.
• This rose to 13% with two confederates.
• This rose to 32% with 3 confederates.
• Conformity started to fall below 35% when number of confederates were above 8.

Question 4

What did he conclude from the variable of Group Size?

Answer 4

• Most people are very sensitive to the views of others.
• A majority does not need to be more than three to cause conformity.

Question 5

Give a praise for Group Size.

Answer 5

• Pike and Laland (2010) - stickleback fish demonstrated conformity to feeding behavior buy showing an increased level of copying a ‘demonstrator’ fish at a rich food site. However as the number of ‘demonstrator’ fishes increased conformity decreased.

Question 6

What did Asch find when he changed the Unanimity in his experiment?

Answer 6

• People conformed less in the presence of a dissenter
• Conformity rates of 32%, but this dropped to 5.5% with another non-conforming confederate appears to give the participants the ability to behave more independently.