asch's research

• Asch devised a procedure to assess how much people will conform to the opinion of others even in a situation where the answer is certain.
• procedure

  • 123 male undergraduates tested.There was one real participant and the rest were confederates.
  • Participants were seated around a table and asked to look at three lines. They then called out which of the three lines they thought was the same length as the standard line with the real participant always answering second to last.
  • 12/18 of the trials were critical trials where confederates were told to give the same wrong answer. Asch wanted to observe if the participant would stick to what they believed to be right or would go along with others due to the pressure of the majority.
• findings

  • On the 12 critical trials the conformity rate was 

  33%.When participants were interviewed afterwards they said they conformed to avoid rejection which demonstrates normative social influence in specific compliance.They also said that they continued to privately trust their own judgements.,but changed their public attitude(compliance).Asch also discovered individual differences in conformity rates.

  • Asch conducted a control condition without the confederates giving wrong answers.Participants made mistakes 1% of the time.   
• asch's variations

  • task difficulty
  • group size
  • unanimity
• task difficulty

  • Asch made the differences between the line lengths much smaller so the answer was less obvious.Under these conditions the level of conformity increased.Lucas et al found that the influence of task difficulty is moderated by the self efficacy of the individual and those with high levels of self efficacy remain more independent in their answers to the maths problems.
• group size

  Asch found out that with three confederates conformity to the wrong answer rose to 31.8%.But addition of further confederates after this made no difference.
• unanimity

  He added a confederate that either said another wrong answer or the right answer.Levels of conformity decreased