Variations

• What are Asch's 3 variations?

  • Group size
  • Unanimity
  • Task difficulty
• What is group size?

  • He wanted to know whether the size of the group would be more important than the agreement of the group
  • Asch found that with three confederates, conformity to the wrong answer rose to 31.8%. But the addition of further confederates made little difference
  • This suggest that a small majority is sufficient for influence to be exerted but, at the other extreme, there is no need for a majority of more than three
• Conclusion:

  Asch concluded that people conform more when the pressure is created by 3-4 other group members, when a task is difficult (due to informational social influence), and when the group’s unanimity is broken.
• What is unanimity?

  • Asch also wanted to know if the presence of another, non-conforming, person would affect the naive participant's conformity
  • To test this he introduced a confederate who disagreed with the others - sometimes the new confederate gave the correct answer and sometimes he gave the wrong one
  • Levels of conformity dropped from 32% to 5%
• What is task difficulty?

  • Asch made the line-judging task more difficult by making the stimulus line and the comparison lines more similar in length
  • He found that conformity increased under these conditions
• Aim:

  To investigate which variables affect conformity rates; specifically group size, task difficulty and unanimity of the group.
• Method:


  Laboratory experiment