AO3-Asch(1955)

• Mundane Realism: the tasks the participants were asked to complete do not reflect those they would experience in everyday life.
• Temporal Validity: the findings from the variation studies (1950s) may not reflect how people would behave today. Therefore they lack temporal validity.
• Population Validity: the samples in the variation studies do not represent of the wider population, so they lack population validity.
• Ecological Validity: in lab experiments like these variation studies, this type of validity is low. The artificial setting does not represent real life.
• Are the variation studies reliable?

  Yes. They were all conducted in a lab setting with high controls and standardised procedures for all participants.
• Deception was broken in the variation studies as with the baseline experiment, as participants were led to believe the confederates were real participants.
• Lucas et al (2006) found that participants given easy and hard maths questions are likely to conform when the problems are harder. This supports task difficulty as a variable affecting conformity.
• Jenness (1932) found that participants will change their original answer, when they see the responses of others and are provided with another opportunity to estimate the number of beans in the glass bottle.
• Fiske (2014) criticised the realism of the task, stating the groups do not resemble those we experience in real life. This limits the real world applications.
• Neto (1995) suggests that women may be more conformist as they are more concerned with social relationships and feelings of acceptance.
• Bond & Smith (1996) highlight the differences between individualistic and collectivist cultures. Individualistic cultures like the USA are more concerned about themselves rather than the group. This might explain why conformity rates in collectivist cultures like China are higher.
• The samples used in the variation experiments were not representative as they were mostly students from the USA.
• Why were the variation samples culturally biased?

  All from the USA (ethnocentric)
• As participants were invited into a lab setting, they may have changed their behaviour to please the researchers. Risk of demand characteristics.