Asch's study

• Asch's baseline procedure

  Assessed to what extent people would conform

  123 US men tested.

  One naive participant. Rest were confederates

  Each participant was shown a line on one card and had to match it with a comparison line. (A,B or C)

  Confederates gave a scripted wrong answer.
• Asch's baseline procedure - findings

  Naive participant agreed with incorrect answer 36.8% of the time.

  25% of participants never gave a wrong answer
• Variables Asch tested

  • group size
  • unanimity
  • task difficulty
• group size

  varied number of confederates from 1-15

  conformity increased with group size up until a point.

  3 confederates - 31.8%

  as more added there was little difference.
• unanimity

  introduced a confederate who disagreed with the other confederates.

  either gave other wrong answer or the right answer.

  naive participant conformed less often in presence of a dissenter.
• task difficulty

  made the stimulus line and comparison lines more similar to each other in length.

  harder for genuine participants to see the difference.

  conformity increased

  situation became more ambiguous so assume others are right.

  informational social influence
• Limitation - artificial situation

  Participants knew they were in a research study and could have had demand characteristics.

  Doesn't resemble everyday life.

  Cannot generalise to real world situations.
• Limitation - limited application

  Participants were all American men.

  Cannot generalise to other cultures/genders.

  Research suggests women are more likely to conform as they are concerned about relationships and being accepted.

  US is a individualist culture.

  Conformity rates are higher in collectivist cultures.
• Strength - research support

  For task difficulty.

  Lucas et al -> asked participants to solve easy and hard maths problems. Participants conformed more when the problems were harder.
• Counterpoint - research support

  Lucas et al

  found conformity is more complex than Asch suggested.

  Participants with high confidence in their maths abilities conformed less than low confidence participants.

  Can be influenced by individual factors.