Variables That Affect Conformity. Flashcards
What are the factors that affect conformity?
Group Size, Unanimity, Task Difficulty.
How did Asch research into the affect of group size?
He manipulated the size of the group of confederates carrying out the conformity trial by 1,2,3,4,8,10 or 15 in the group.
What did Asch find the affect of group size was on conformity?
Conformity increased as the number of confederates rose from 1-3 but after this group size did not make much difference.
What did Bond find the affect of group size was in his meta-analysis?
Conformity to be similar to Asch’s findings with a majority of sizes of 3, 4, 5, 6 or 7.
What did Campbell and Fairey suggest about Group Size on conformity?
That tasks relating to personal preference, group size has a linear effect where more people leads to greater levels of conformity.
What did Bond find about participants responses being given privately or publicly?
That when participants were able to give their response privately there was a small negative relationship between conformity and group size.
When is conformity most likely to occur?
When the confederates are unanimous in their answers.
What did Asch find about unanimity on conformity?
When one confederate is instructed to disagree with the majority judgement and give the correct answer on every trial, conformity decreased from 37% of critical trials down to 5.5%.
What did Asch find about the presence of a dissenter?
Led to a reduction in conformity for two reasons:
a) the dissenter provided useful information about the correct response
b) reduces the need for social group approval.
What else did Asch find out about the dissenter?
They did not need to share the naive participants judgement finding it was just as effective as an accurate confederate in reducing conformity.
What did Asch find about Task Difficulty on conformity?
If the task is difficult, such as the comparison lines are all similar in length to the standard line then conformity increases.
What did Lucas et al find out about the affect of task difficulty on conformity?
• Gave students easy and hard maths problems and found a greater level of conformity when the problems were hard.
• Particularly so if participants doubted their maths abilities.
What did Perrin and Spenser’s study show about task difficulty?
When a task is familiar, conformity is less likely as engineers did not conform as readily on an Asch- type task as the participants did in the original study.
