Variables affecting conformity

• P: It is possible that Asch's findings are unique because the research took place in a particular period of US history when conformity was more important.
• Explanation/ evidence for child of its time

  E: US was in the grip of McCarthyism, a period when people were scared to go against the majority and so more likely to conform. Perrin and Spencer attempted to repeat Asch's study. In their initial study they obtained only one conforming response out of a total of 396 trials where a majority unanimously gave the same wrong answer. However, where they used youths on probation as participants and probation officers as the confederates, they found similar levels of conformity to those found by Asch back in the 1950s.
• Link for a child of its time

  L: This confirmed that conformity is more likely if the perceived costs of not conforming

  are high, which would have been the case during the McCarthy era in the US.
• P: Bond (2005) suggests a limitation of research in conformity is that studies have used only a limited range of majority sizes.

  E: Asch had concluded that a majority size of three was a sufficient number for maximal influence and therefore most subsequent studies using the Asch procedure have used three as the majority size. Bond points out that no studies other than Asch have used a majority size greater than nine, and in other studies of conformity the range of majority sizes used is much narrower, typically between two and four.
• Link for bond

  L: This, suggests Bond, means we know very little about the effect of larger majority

  sizes on conformity levels.
• P: We should remember that, in Asch's study, only one-third of the trials where the majority unanimously gave the same wrong answer produced a conforming response.

  E: In other words, in two-thirds of these trials the participants resolutely stuck to their original judgement despite being faced with an overwhelming majority expressing a totally different view.
• Link for independent behaviour

  L: Asch believed that, rather than showing human beings to be overly conformist, his study had actually demonstrated a commendable tendency for participants to stick to what they believed to be the correct judgement, i.e. to show independent behaviour.