Variables affecting conformity Flashcards
Key study in conformity
ASCH
AIM: to see how the lone real’ participant would react to the behaviour of the confederates.
PROC: 123 male US undergraduates
Seated around a table and asked to look at three lines of different lengths.
Took turns to call out which of the three lines they thought was the same length as a’standard’ line with the real participant always answering second to last.
On 12 of the 18 trials (i.e. the ‘critical’ trials) the confederates were instructed to give the same incorrect answer.
FINDINGS:
Average conformity rate was 33% in critical trials
25% never conformed on any of the critical trials
50% conformed on six or more of the critical trials
5% conformed on all 12 of the critical trials.
Control condition: no confederates giving wrong answers= wrong answer given only 1% of the time
Interviews after: discovered that majority of participants who conformed had continued privately to trust their own perceptions and judgements, but changed their public behaviour, giving incorrect answers to avoid disapproval from group
What are the variables affecting conformity
Group size
Unamity of the majority
Difficulty of the task
Variable: group size
1 confederate: conformity dropped to just 3% of the critical trials
2 confederates: conformity was 12.8% of the critical trials
3 confederates: conformity rose to 31.8% of the critical trials
The above finding is the same percentage as in Asch’s original experiment, in which there were six to eight confederates
Thus, conformity peaks with three confederates, once majority pressure is established.
Campbell and Fairey: group size may have a different effect depending on the type of judgement being made and the motivation of the individual.
No objectively correct answer: the larger the majority the more likely they are to be swayed.
Is a correct response: views of just one or two others will usually be sufficient.
Variable: Unanimity of the majority
Unanimity refers to the extent of agreement/consensus across a group
When the real participant was given the support of either another real participant or a confederate who had been instructed to give the right answers throughout, conformity levels dropped significantly, reducing the percentage of wrong answers from 33% to just 5.5%.
Lone ‘dissenter’ gave an answer that was both different from the majority and different from the true answer: conformity rates dropped to 9%,
Variable: difficulty of task
Asch made the differences between the line lengths much smaller=the level of conformity increased.
They found that the influence of task difficulty is moderated by the self-efficacy of the individual.
High self efficacy participants= remained more independent
low self-efficacy participants= less independent
This shows that situational differences (task difficulty) and individual differences (self-efficacy) are both important in determining conformity.
AO3: Variables affecting conformity
str: Standardised research
lim: child of its time
lim: guessed aim
lim: cultural diffs
Variables affecting conformity str: Standardised research
Asch used a standardised procedure (e.g. same group number per trial; same number of trials; same question asked)
A standardised procedure means that the study can be replicated many times over
Repeated replications should show consistent results which equals high reliability
Variables affecting conformity lim: child of its time
Asch’s findings are unique because the research took place in a particular period of US history when conformity was more important.
In 1956, the US was in the grip of McCarthyism, a strong anti-Communist period when people were scared to go against the majority and so more likely to conform.
Perrin and Spencer 1980: repeated Asch study in UK In their initial study they obtained only one conforming response out of a total of 396 trials where a majority unanimously gave the same wrong answer.
Subsequent study, where they used youths on probation as participants and probation officers as the confederates, they found similar levels of conformity to those found by Asch back in the 1950s.
This confirmed that conformity is more likely if the perceived costs of not conforming are high, which would have been the case during the McCarthy era in the US.
Variables affecting conformity lim: guessed aim
It is possible that some of the participants may have guessed the aim of the study due to the easiness of the task
If any participants had guessed the aim then they may simply have gone along with giving the wrong answer as this is what they thought was required of them (known as response bias)
Response bias reduces the validity of the findings
Variables affecting conformity lim: cultural differences
Research suggests that there are important cultural differences in conformity, and
we might therefore expect different results dependent on the culture in which a study takes place.
Smith et al: analysed the results of Asch-type studies across a number of different cultures.
Average conformity rate across the different cultures= 31.2%.
Average conformity rate for individualist cultures = about 25%
Collectivist cultures in Africa, Asia and South America= 37%.
Markus and Kitayama: suggest that the reason that a higher level of conformity arises in collectivist cultures is because it is viewed more favourably, a of form of ‘social glue’ that binds communities together.
