Variables Affecting Conformity As Researched By Asch Flashcards
What were the 3 variables for Asch
Asch was interested in the conditions that might lead to an increase or decrease in conformity. He carried out some variations of his original procedure. He particularly looked at three variables including 1)group size, 2)unanimity and 3)task difficulty
Explain the 3 variables that Asch looked at
Group Size – with regards to group size, Asch looked at the number of people in a group and whether this had an effect on the conformity rate. He found that there was very little conformity if there were one or two confederates in the majority. However, if there was a majority of three confederates, conformity rates went to 30%. However, after this further increase in the majority size did not affect conformity rates – showing that group size is important up to a point.
Campbell and Fairey (1989), said that group size will have an effect depending on the type of judgement being made and the motivation of the individual.
If the task is ambiguous, then conformity is likely to happen following the majority. If the task is clear, then conformity is likely to happen to ‘fit in’.
Unanimity of the majority- This simply means that when everyone in the group agreed with the same answer (regardless of whether this answer was right or wrong). However, If one confederate gave the correct answer, then conformity levels dropped significantly from 33% to 5.5%. If one confederate gave the wrong answer and it was not the same as the majority, then conformity rates dropped to 9% suggesting that you only needed one break in the unanimous decision for conformity rates to drop.
Task difficulty- this variable was measuring whether the difficulty of the task given to the pps had an effect on whether they would conform or not. In one variation, Asch made the differences between the line lengths much smaller (so that the ‘correct’ answer was less obvious). Under these circumstances, the level of conformity increased. Lucas et al. (2006) investigated this relationship a little further. They found that the influence of task difficulty is moderated by the self-efficacy of the individual. (the term self-efficacy refers to the idea that how competent/confident a person feels in carrying out a task). When exposed to maths problems in an Asch-type task, high self- efficacy participants, even under conditions of high task difficulty remained more independent than participants of low self-efficacy. This shows that situational differences (task difficulty) and personality differences (self-efficacy) are both important in determining conformity
Weaknesses of Asch’s study
Asch’s study may be a child of its time: Perrin and Spencer (1980) repeated Asch’s original study on engineering students in the UK and found that only one student conformed in a total of 396 trials – remember in Asch’s study 75% of his sample conformed at least once. Thus Perrin and Spencer’s study shows that conformity does not always occur. However, it could be that engineering students felt more confident about measuring lines that Asch’s original sample. Or, it is also possible that the 1950s (when Asch did his study) was an especially conformist decade in the US thus it may be seen as the norm. Nevertheless, society has changed greatly since the 1950s and it could be that people are in fact less conformist today. This is a limitation of Asch’s research because it means that the Asch effect is not consistent across situations or time thus suggesting that being conformist is not an important feature of human behaviour. Therefore Asch’s research lacked temporal validity.
Artificial situation and task: there is no doubt that all the participants knew that they were in a study and may have thus shown demand characteristics (i.e. guessed the aim of the study and acted in a way to please the experimenter). Also, the task of identifying the correct line is a very ‘silly’ task – not something that we do every day thus it may not have made any difference to the participants if they conformed or not. Furthermore, although the real participants were placed in a group, Fiske (2014), argues that ‘Asch’s groups were not very groupy’ since they do not resemble the groups that we are all part of in everyday life. Both these points about the actual task given and the group of confederates opens Asch’s study to criticism because we cannot thus generalise the findings to everyday situation especially when in everyday situations conformity may be important especially when we interact with people and groups in a more direct manner - we could thus argue that Asch’s studied lacked ecological validity.
Limited application of findings: The participants in Asch’s study were all men – do the findings also apply to women? In fact, research has suggested that women may be more conformist since they are concerned about social relationships - such as being accepted, than men are (Neto, 1995).
Also, Bond and Smith (1996) point out that the men in Asch’s study were from the US which is seen as an individualistic culture where people are concerned about themselves rather than the group. Interestingly, when Asch’s study was carried out in more collectivist cultures such as China – where the social group is more important than the individual, conformity rates were higher. This finding makes sense since ‘collectivist cultures’ are more oriented to group needs so conformity rates would be higher.
This therefore suggests that Asch’s findings are very limited because they can only be applied to US males and not women or other cultures. We could thus argue that Asch’s research lacks ‘population validity’!
Ethical issues: Asch’s research was criticised heavily on ethical grounds. The main ethical issue in Asch’s study was deception – for example, he used confederates in the group – the real participant was not aware that the group formation was confederates. Also, he got the confederates to give wrong answers on 12/18 trials. This deception could then lead to psychological harm for the real participant because they would be confused on why everybody in the group is giving a clearly wrong answer – this would lead them to become confused and possibly stressed. We could also question whether Asch then gave his participants fully informed consent! Although Asch did debrief his participants, does this then justify the deceit used in this experiment? In other words, does the end result of Asch’s study justify the means in which he conducted the study (e.g. contravening ethical issues)?
Asch study strengths
A strength of Asch’s study into conformity is that it was carried out in a lab setting and was carefully controlled. This means that there was good control over extraneous variables, therefore any change in results was due to the change in the independent variable and its effect on the dependent variable. The results show a direct cause and effect link and so are ,therefore, reliable. Asch had not expected to see such a high degree of conformity. The fact that the results of the experiment were not what he expected suggests that this was a well-designed and useful experiment: rather than confirming the experimenter’s prejudice, it provided information which challenged it.
Artificial situation of lab experiment resulted in reliable data as the extraneous variables such as participant variable e.g. age was easy to control
Reliable data suggests the study can be carried out by another researcher which can lead to data to be compared which results in patterns and trends that can tell us about how conformity changes within time and situation
