Asch's line study

• What did Asch want to investigate?

  Investigating the effect of conformity with the presence of a group
• Describe the participants of Asch's study.

  Male American undergraduate students
• What was the basic task of Asch's study?

  • It was an unambiguous task
  • Cards needed to be matched up correctly with the line length
  • P's and 6 confederates verbally out loud for the answer
  • The participant answered second to last as they were all seated around a table
  • The actors gave wrong answers 12 out of the 18 trials
• What were the findings of the experiment?

  • 32% conformity rate of the critical trials
  • 74% of all p's had conformed at least once
  • 26% never conformed
• What was the conclusion of the experiment?

  Researchers found evidence for compliance as it was an easy task and a variation of the task supports Asch's hypothesis (variation with no confederates)
• What is one positive evaluation of the Asch study?

  • Line task was of no importance to p's belief systems
  • Line task lacks ecological validity
  • Therefore, the task may not be able to generalise to real life
  • Crutchfield study says otherwise
  • Crutchfield repeated the same thing but with statements that college students would not normally agree with
  • e.g. Americans sleep only 4-5 hours a day and life expectancy is 25 years
  • Therefore, Asch study does have eco validity
• What is a negative evaluation regarding temporal validity?

  • Time period at which Asch carried it out makes it lack temporal validity
  • It was at a time where McCarthyism took place and was biased against the left, as well as being conservative
  • In support of this, Perrin and Spencer repeated with British students and found only 1 conforming response out of 396
  • However, they used maths, engineering and chem students so it was possible that they may have been trained against conformity rather than the time period
• What is another evaluation regarding population validity?

  • The study lacks population validity
  • The sample was all males which makes it an androcentric biased sample
  • Research showed females conformed more than men.
  • However, the only time studies showed this was when there was a male majority or when there was a male researcher present
  • Therefore, Asch's study has methodological issues
• What is another evaluation of Asch's study?

  • Sample was all American people (ethnocentric bias)
  • America is a individualistic society
  • This may not generalise to people in collectivist cultures
  • Individualistic cultures generally focus on the self but collectivist cultures focus on the self
  • Collectivist cultures are found to be more conforming as seen in Smith and Byrne
• What is an evaluation regarding ethical issues?

  • Asch's study is unethical
  • There was deception about the true aim of the experiment; line perception when in reality it was about group conformity
  • There was also deception about the confederates being real
  • P's also suffered harm as they may have suffered stress and anxiety from
• What did unanimous majority change?

  • Conformity dropped when one dissenter
  • One dissenter dropped it to 5%
  • Majority of 3 was better than with 7 confed's and 1 dissenter
• What did the 'size of majority' do?

  • With 2 other confederates, the conformity rate dropped to 12.8%
  • The highest conformity rates were given at 3 people
  • Beyond 3 confederates, the conformity rate did not change
  • If there were 7 or 8 confederates, people suspected collusion (Baron and Byrne)
• What did increased difficulty do?

  • Due to the difficulty of the task increased when the researchers made the line lengths similar
  • This made the task more ambiguous
  • This increased conformity rates
• What did cultural differences do?

  • Smith and Byrne looked at 31 studies
  • People in collectivist cultures showed higher rates of conformity
  • People in collectivist cultures think of the group rather than in individualistic where people are encouraged to focus on individual autonomy