Situational factors

• What are situational factors ?

  Features of an environment that affect the degree to which individuals yield to group pressure
• what are the 3 factors that affect conformity ?

  group size

  unanimity

  task difficulty
• how does group size affect conformity ?

  The conformity rate increase if the group size increases however there is a point where when group size continues to increase and conformity doesn’t increase
• when Asch redid their study in (1956) and changed the group size what was found?

  found that with one real participant and one confederate conformity was low , rising to 13% with two confederates

  adding extra confederate up to 15 had no further effect on the overall conformity rate ?
• how does unanimity affect conformity ?

  conformity rates decline when majority influence is not unanimous

  reduction in the majority’s agreement
• what did Asch (1956) find when unanimity was used in the redo of his study ?

  found that if one confederate who went against the other confederates conformity dropped from around 32% to 5.5%
• how does task difficulty affect conformity ?

  greater conformity rates are seen when task difficulty increases as the right answer becomes less obvious

  this means that individuals will look to others more for guidance as to what the correct response is
• what did Asch (1956) find when he increased the task difficulty increased ?

  increased task difficulty by making the comparison lines similar to each other

  when he did so participants were more likely to conform to the confederates