Asch's study

• What was Asch’s aim?

  To investigate whether participants would conform to a majority who gave obviously wrong answers for an unambiguous task To investigate whether participants would conform to a majority who gave obviously wrong answers for an unambiguous task
• who was Asch?

  Asch devised this famous experiment whereby there was an obvious answer to a line judgement task . If the participant gave an incorrect answer it would be clear that this was due to group pressure
• What was Asch’s procedure ?

  1. 123 Male students from the USA participated in what they thought was a ‘vision test
  2. Using a line judgement task, Asch put a naïve participant in a room with 6 confederates
  3. The confederates had agreed in advance what their responses would be when presented with the line task. the real participant did not know this and was lead to believe the other 6 were also real participants
  4. Each person in the room had to state their answer aloud. The answer was always obvious
  5. The real participant sat one from the end of the row
  6. There were 18 trials in total
• What was Asch’s procedure

  7) 12 gave the wrong answer these were called critical trials

  8) Asch was interested to see if the real participant would conform to the majority view

  9) Asch also had a control condition where there were no confederate only real participants
• What were Asch’s Findings

  • Asch measured the number of times each participant confirmed to the majority view

  • 36.8 % of the critical trials were conformed on, meaning that about a third of the time the incorrect answer was given to a task with an obvious answer

  • over the 12 critical trials 75% of participants conformed at least once and 25% of participants never confirmed

  • in the control group(all ‘real participants’) with no pressure to conform less than 1% of participants gave the wrong answer thus proving that the correct Answer was infact obvious
• What was Asch's conclusion ?


  When the participants were interviewed after the experiment most said that they did not really believe their conforming answers but went along with the group for the fear of being rejected therefore providing support for normative social influence
• In Asch’s study what happened to conformity rates when the size of the majority of we just one or two confederates ?

  Conformity rates reduces

  The real participant confirmed on 14% of the critical trials
• In Asch’s study what happened to conformity rates when There were three or more confederates and one real participant ?

  • it stayed the same

  • 32% conformity on the critical trials
• In Asch’s study what happened to conformity rates when the participant had the social support of another person who picked the right answer

  It reduced as conformity levels dropped to 5.5%
• In Asch’s study what happened to conformity rates when A “dissenter” have an incorrect Answer that was different to the majorities incorrect answer ?

  It reduced only 9% conformity
• In Asch’s study what happened to conformity rates when The task was more difficult

  Conformity levels increased
• Advantages of Asch's study

  it is a laboratory experiment therefore it had large sample sizes standardised material thus creating high internal validity
• Advantages of explanations for conformity 


  • Asch's original research supports normative social influence as 75% of participants conformed to the incorrect majority at least once despite the correct answer being unambiguous
  • Asch manipulated the task difficulty of the line judging task by making the differences between he line lengths less obvious this increased the ambiguity of the answer therefore they were more likely to conform supporting ISI