Variables affecting conformity

Question 1

In what year did Asch study conformity?

Answer 1

1956

Question 2

How many participants took part in Asch’s study? Who were they?

Answer 2

123 male US undergraduates

Question 3

What was the procedure of Asch’s study?

Answer 3

→ Seated around a table, asked to look at three lines of different lengths
→ Took turns to call out which of the lines they thought was the same length as a ‘standard line’
→ Real participant answered second to last
→ Solution was fairly obvious
→ 12/18 trials( the ‘critical’ trials), confederates were asked to give the same incorrect answer

Question 4

What was Asch interested in?

Answer 4

→ Asch was interested in whether the ‘real’ participant would stick to what they believed to be right or cave in to the pressure of the majority and go along with its decision

Question 5

What was the conformity rate for the critical trials?

Answer 5

33%

Question 6

What percentage of participants never conformed on any of the critical trials?

Answer 6

25%

Question 7

What percentage of participants conformed on 6 or more of the trials?

Answer 7

50%

Question 8

What percentage of participants conformed on all trials?

Answer 8

5%

Question 9

What percentage of participants made mistakes on the control condition?

Answer 9

1%

Question 10

What did Asch find when he interviewed participants after the experiment?

Answer 10

Asch found that the participants who had conformed had continued privately to trust their own perceptions and had changed their public behaviour to avoid disapproval from other group members

Question 11

What was conformity like when the majority consisted of one or two confederates?

Answer 11

Little

Question 12

What did conformity jump to wen the majority was three confederates?

Answer 12

30%

Question 13

Increase in size did not substantially change the conformity rate after 3 confederates. What does this suggest about the size of the majority?

Answer 13

It is important but only up to a point

Question 14

What did Campbell and Fairey find out about group size? (3 things)

Answer 14

Group size may have an affect depending on the type of judgement being made and the motivation of the individual
Where there is no objectively correct answer (e.g. musical preference) and the individual is concerned about ‘fitting in’, then the larger the majority the more likely they are to be swayed
When there is a correct response and the individual is concerned about being correct, then the views of just one or two others will be sufficient

Question 15

What did conformity levels drop to 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?

Answer 15

the percentage of wrong answers dropped from 33% to just 5.5%

Question 16

What did conformity levels drop to when the lone ‘dissenter’ gave a different answer from the majority and the true answer?

Answer 16

9%

Question 17

What did Asch conclude from the unanimity of the majority?

Answer 17

Asch concluded that it was breaking the group’s unanimus position that was the major factor in conformity reduction

Question 18

In one variation, when Asch made the differences between the line lengths much smaller (so that the ‘correct’ answer was less obvious and the task much more difficult, what happened to the level of conformity?

Answer 18

It increased

Question 19

What did Lucas et al find about the difficulty of Asch’s task?

Answer 19

They found that the influence of task difficulty is moderated by the self-efficacy of the individual . When exposed to maths problems in an Asch-type task, high self-efficacy participants (i.e. participants who were confident in their own abilities) remained more independent than low self-efficacy participants, even under conditions of high task difficulty. This shows that situational differences (task difficulty) and individual differences (self-efficacy) are both important in determining conformity.

Question 20

Why might Asch’s study be a ‘child of its time’?

Answer 20

the research took place in a particular period of US history when conformity was high. In 1966, 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.

Question 21

In what two ways did Perrin and Spencer attempt to repeat Asch’s study?

Answer 21

in the UK in the 1980’s using students who were studying science and engineering. 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.
In a subsequent study, they used youths on probation as participants and probation officers as the confederates. This time they found similar levels of conformity to those found by Asch back in the 1950s.

Question 22

What did Perrin and Spencer’s study confirm about conformity?

Answer 22

conformity is more likely if the perceived costs of not conforming are high (Perrin and Spencer, 1980), which would have been the case during the McCarthy era in the US.

Question 23

What limitation did Bond suggest of research in conformity? And in what year?

Answer 23

2005
studies have used only a limited range of majority sizes. Investigators were quick to accept Asch’s conclusion that a majority size of three was a sufficient number for maximal influence and therefore most subsequent studies using the Asch procedure have used three as the majority size. Bond points out that no studies other than Asch have used a majority size greater than nine, and in other studies of conformity the range of majority sizes used is much narrower, typically between two and four. This, suggests Bond, means we know very little about the effect of larger sizes on conformity levels.

Question 24

Why might it be independent behaviour rather than conformity?

Answer 24

only about one-third of the trials where the majority unanimously gave the same wrong answer produced a conforming response. In other words, in two-thirds of these trials the participants resolutely stuck to their original judgement despite being faced with an overwhelming majority expressing a totally different view. Asch believed that rather than showing human beings to be overly conformist, his study demonstrated a commendable tendency for participants to stick to what they believed to be the correct judgement, i.e. to show independent behaviour.

Question 25

What was a problem for the confederates of Asch’s study?

Answer 25

it would have been difficult for them to act convincingly when giving the wrong answer, something that would pose serious problems for the validity of the study

Question 26

What did Mori and Arai do and in what year?

Answer 26

Mori and Arai (2010) overcame the confederate problem by using a technique where participants wore glasses with special polarising filters. Three participants in each group wore identical glasses and a fourth wore a different set with a different filter. This meant that each participant viewed the same stimuli but one participant saw them differently. This had the effect of causing them to judge that a different (to the rest of the group) comparison line matched the standard line. For female participants, the result closely matched those of the original Asch study, although not for the male participants.

Question 27

What do the results of Mori and Arai’s study suggest about the confederates in the original study?

Answer 27

They had acted convincingly

Question 28

What has research suggested about cultural differences in conformity?

Answer 28

we might expect different results dependent on the culture in which a study takes place.

Question 29

What did Smith et al do and in what year?

Answer 29

(2006) analysed the results of Asch-type studies across a number of different cultures

Question 30

What was the average conformity rate across different cultures? (Smith et al)

Answer 30

31.2%

Question 31

What was interesting about Smith et al’s findings? (include percentages)

Answer 31

the average conformity rate for individualist cultures (e.g. in Europe and the US) was about 25% whereas for collectivist cultures in Africa, Asia and South America it was much higher at 37%.

Question 32

What do Markus and Kitayama suggest the reason for higher levels of conformity in collectivist cultures is?

Answer 32

conformity is viewed more favourably, as a form of ‘social glue’ that binds communities together.