Evaluation

• A limitation of Asch’s research is that the task and situation was artificial. The participants knew they were taking part in a study and the fore may have shown demand characteristics . The situation also does not represent everyday life as only a sample of male students where used therefore his study is gender biased and cannot be generalised to real world situations. Therefore the study Lacks mundane realism – how close the materials used in the study are to real life.
• Another limitation is that Asch’s findings have little application. He used a sample of only American men Neto 1995 suggested that women are more conformist as they are more concerned about social relationships and being accepted. Furthermore the US is a individualistic culture and studies in collectivist cultures e.g. china have found higher conformity rates according to bond and smiths meta analysis on 17 countries.
• His distinction in cultural norms and values highlights how we cannot use Asch’s research to understand conformity cross culturally. This suggests Asch’s research does not tell us anything about conformity cross culturally or in women.
• One strength of Asch’s research is that there is research support for the effects of task difficulty. Lucas et al 2006 asked participants to solve easy and hard maths problems and found that participants conformed more when the problem was harder This shows Asch was correct in claiming that task difficulty is a variable that affects conformity .
• A strength of Asch’s research is that it has high validity. The experiment was carried out in a lab which means that the experiment has high levels of control this increases the internal validity. Asch also used standardized procedures therefore increase the ability for the research to be replicated thus increasing the reliability of the study
• However a limitation is that the results may only be relevant to 1950s America. In America the 1950s were particularly a conformist time as perrin and Spencer suggested that the Asch affect was a child of its time they replicated the stuffy using engineering students and found conformity in only 1 out of 396 British students. This suggests Asch’s study was a child of its time and may have reflected the state of society then therefore the study Lacks temporal validity.