AO1

• Aim:

  To investigate whether people will conform to group pressure even when the correct answer in a task is unambiguous (clear or obvious).
• Method:

  123 male undergraduate students who volunteered to take part in a ‘visual discrimination’ task.’  

  Laboratory experiment.
• Procedure:

  A single naïve participant was placed into each group with 6-8 confederates. The group sat around a table and the naïve participant always sat either last or 2nd to last so that they could hear the confederates’ responses before giving their own. 

  
  

  The group were shown cards with a ‘standard line’ and asked which of three ‘comparison lines’ matched the length of the ‘standard line’. The correct answer was always obvious. 

  However, in 12 critical trials out of 18, the confederates were told to provide the same incorrect response.
• Results:

  Asch found that 75% of the naïve participants conformed at least once (so 25% did not conform at all) and that the overall conformity rate was 36.8% across all of the critical trials. 

  When the naïve participants were interviewed after the experiment, the majority reported that they knew what the correct answers were but that they conformed to the incorrect answers to avoid rejection by the group (an example of compliance due to normative social influence). 
• Conclusion:

  Asch concluded that individuals do conform to group pressure even when their task is unambiguous. He named this ‘The Asch Effect’.