KEY RESEARCH STUDY: Asch

• What was Asch's procedure?

  123 male undergraduate student volunteers were asked to take part in a visual discrimination task, although unbeknown to the volunteers, all but one of the participants were confederates of the investigator.
• Real purpose was to see how the ‘real’ participant would react to the behaviour of the confederates.

  • Participants were asked to look at three lines of different lengths.
  • They took turns to call out which of the three lines was the same length as the ‘standard’ line.
  • Real participant always answered second to last.
  • On 12 out of the 18 trials the confederates were instructed to give the same incorrect answer.
  • Asch was interested in whether the ‘real’ participants would stick with what they believed to be right or cave to the pressure of the majority and go along with its decision.
• What was Asch's findings?

  Average conformity rate was 33% - i.e., participants agree with the incorrect response given by other group members on average, on one-third of the trials.
• What was Asch's variables?

  Asch carried out several variations of his study to find out which variable had the most significant effect on the level of conformity shown by participants.

  • Group size
  • Unanimity of the majority
  • Difficulty of the task
• What did Asch do for the group size?

  Little conformity when the majority consisted of just one or two confederates.

  • Under pressure of 3 confederates, the majority jumped to 30%.
  • Further increases in size of the majority did not increase this level of conformity substantially, indicating the size of the majority is important but only up to a certain point.
• What did Asch do for the unanimity of the majority group?

  In the original study, the confederates unanimously gave the same wrong answer.

  • When the real participant was given support by another real participant or confederate, who had been instructed to give the right answers throughout, conformity levels dropped significantly, reducing the percentage of wrong answers from 33% to 5.5%.
  • When a “dissenter” gave an answer that was different from the majority and different from the true answer, the conformity rates dropped to 9%.

  Led to Asch to conclude that it was the breaking of the group’s unanimous position that was the major factor in conformity reduction.
• What did Asch do for the difficulty of the task?

  Asch made the difference between the line lengths smaller (so that the 'correct' answer was less obvious and the task was more difficult).

  • Under these conditions the level of conformity increased.