Conformity: Asch's

• Group size


  • Asch added more confederates, thus increasing the size of the majority
  • With 3 confeds, conformity to wrong answer was 31.8%
  • Addition of more confeds made no difference
  • Suggests a small majority is not sufficient for influence however there is no need for a majority more than 3
• Unanimity


  • The extent to which all the members of a group agree
  • Added a confederate that disagreed with majority, giving the correct or other incorrect answer
  • A dissenter resulted in conformity reducing by a 1/4
  • Enabled the naive ppt to behave more independently
• Task difficulty


  • Made line comparisons more similar in length
  • Conformity increased
  • Situation is more ambiguous therefore naive participants assume that the majority is more likely to be right. (ISI)
• Asch's Procedure (1956)


  Procedure:

  123 male American undergraduates tested.

  Shown a series of lines and seated around a table, always answered in the same order (real participant/naïve participant answered last)

  Confederates told to give the same incorrect answer 12/18 trials
• Asch's Findings

  Findings:

  • The naive ppt gave wrong answer 36.8% of the time
  • 25% ppts did not conform on any trials
  • 75% conformed at least once
  • When interviewed, ppts said they conformed to avoid rejection (NSI)
• Asch's Variations:

  Group size

  Unanimity

  Task difficulty
• Negatives of Asch's research


  -People are more likely to conform now in comparison to before (child of its time, Perrin and Spencer 1980)

  -All candidates were male, so therefore biased-Some knew about the research task and displayed demand characteristics

  -The test does not represent everyone, due to beliefs, upbringings and cultures-Asch’s test was carried out in the USA, individualistic culture (less likely to conform)
• What is a limitation of Asch's research in terms of temporal validity?

  • Asch's study is a child of its time due to the context of 1950s being a highly conformist era
  • This is supported by Perrin and Spencer's replication with UK engineering students
  • Only one student conformed in the total of 396 trials- this could be because of the intellectual differences and confidence they felt than the original sample
  • This suggests society has largely changed and are likely lest conformist today, therefore limits Asch's research due to lack of consistency in findings (TEMPORAL VALIDITY+RELIAB)
• What is a limitation of Asch's research- artifice (AO3)

  • Use of artificial stimuli may result in a lack of mundane realism and does not directly measure the effects of conformity under Asch's variables
  • This calls into question the validity of his research and whether findings can be generalised to other situations (ecological validity)
  • Consequences of conformity may be important yet Asch's scenario is too simplistic to explain this
• What is a limitation of Asch's research- androcentrism (AO3)

  • Androcentric research due to only studying 123 male ppts
  • Feeds into alpha bias as differences in gender are ignored and results found were generalised to all genders
  • Research suggests women may be more conformist due to concern about social relationships more than men (NETO 1995)
  • Therefore cannot necessarily generalise findings to everyone, conformity rates are likely to change with both genders in context
• What is a limitation of Asch's research- cultural bias (AO3)

  • 123 ppts were all American males, an individualistic culture
  • Conformity rates tend to be higher in similar studies assessing collectivist cultures
  • Suggests that rates of conformity can be higher than Asch's findings
  • Limitation of research as Asch's is culturally relative to the sample studied and therefore cannot make meaningful generalisations, imposed etic
• What is the Asch effect?

  • The extent to which participants conform even when a situation is unambiguous
  • This describes his findings