asch a03

• • Some argue that asch’s study was a child of its time, it took place in the period of high conformity; mccarthyism a strong anti communist period in the 1960s a time when people were afraid to go against the majority which could means wider society at that time could have been an influencing factor in why people conformed. Perrin and spencer attempted repeated ashc study in 1980s using engineering students and only found 1 conforming result out of 396 trials where the majority unanimously gave the wrong answer. This suggests that Asch's study is in fact a child of it's time. However Perrin's study used engeering students who were experts in measurements and when a group of youths on probation were used as subjects and probation officers as confeds they found similar levels to original. This suggests that people are more likely to conform if percieved consequences are high which would have been the case in the US 1960s
• Bond suggested that a limitation is studies have only used a limited range of majority sizes invcestigators were quick to accept asch’s conclusion that majority sizes of 3 was a sufficient number and therefore most subsequent studies have used the majority sizing of 3 however no studies have used greater than 9 and in most studies this range is even narrower this suggests taht we know very little about the effect of conformity in larger groups therefore it may not be able to be generalised to many groups when more than 3 is present.
• A problem for asch’s study was it would have been difficult for the confederates to act convincingly when giving the wrong answers as they were fully aware of their role.causes problems for the validity of the experiment and cause demand characteristics so participants guess the aim of the experiment if act unconvincingly. However mori and ari overcame this by giving them glasses which meant they saw the lines differently and the wrong answers they were giving were genuine, these results closely matched what asch found in his experiment showing that the confederates had acted convincingly.
• other studies show effects of task difficulty. Lucas (2006) asked participants to solve easy and hard maths problems. given answers from three other students and it was found agreed with the wrong answers more often when harder. Asch’s research was correct in claiming task difficulty variable affecting conformity.

  However, conformity is more complex than Asch’s suggestion. high confidence in their maths abilities conform less on hard tasks than those with low confidence individual-level factor can influence conformity by interacting with situational variables (e.g. task difficulty)