conformity

• conformity?

  a change in a persons behaviour or opinions as a result of real or imagined pressure from a person or group of people
• asch's procedure?

  -wanted to assess to what extent people will conform to opinion of others

  -123 American men tested, each in a group with confederates

  -saw 2 large white cards in each trial. one with line X and other with 3 comparison lines A, B and C where one is the same length as X.

  -had to say out loud which line was equal to X.

  -were in groups of 6-8, naive participant seated last or second to last.
• asch's findings?

  -naive participants agreed with confederates incorrect answers 36.8% of the time

  -there were individual differences, 25% never gave a wrong answer
• how did Asch investigate the variable group size?

  -varied number of confederates from 1-15

  -found a curvilinear relationship between group size and conformity rate. conformity increased with group size but only up to a point.

  -with 3 confederates, conformity rose to 31.8%. but more confederates made little difference. conformity rate soon levelled off.

  -so most people are sensitive to views of others as just 1 or 2 confederates was enough to sway opinion.
• how did Asch investigate the variable unanimity? 


  -introduced a confederate who disagreed with other confederates.

  -in 1 variation dissenter gave correct answer and in another gave wrong answer.

  -naive participant conformed less often in presence of dissenter

  -rate decreased to less than a quarter of the level it was when majority was unanimous.

  -presence of dissenter appeared to free naive participant to behave more independently

  -so influence of majority depends to a large extent on it being unanimous.
• how did Asch investigate the variable task difficulty? 


  -increased the difficulty of line judging task by making stimulus lines and comparison lines more similar in length so harder for genuine participants to see differences between the lines.

  -conformity increased. may be that situation is more ambiguous when task became harder - unclear what right answer is

  -so its natural to look to other people for guidance and assume their right (ISI)
• limitation of asch's research?

  P- task and situation was artificial

  E- participants knew they were in a research study and may have gone with what was expected. task of identifying lines was relatively trivial so no reason not to conform.

  E- fiske said 'asch's groups weren't very groupy' i.e. didnt really resemble groups that we experience in everyday life.

  L- findings don't generalise to real world situations
• another limitation of asch's research?

  P- asch's participants were American men

  E- other research suggests women may be more conformist as they're concerned about social relationships and being accepted and US is an individualist culture. conformity studies conducted in collectivist cultures found that conformity rates were higher

  L- asch's findings tell us little about conformity in women and people from some cultures.
• strength of asch's research?

  P- support from other studies for effects of task difficulty

  E- Lucas et al asked their participants to solve easy and hard maths problems. participants were given answers from 3 other fake students. participants conformed more often when problems were harder.

  L- asch was correct in claiming that task difficulty is one variable that affects conformity.
• CA for strength of asch's research?

  P- Lucas et al study found that conformity is more complex that asch suggested

  E- participants with high confidence in their maths skills conformed less on hard tasks than those with low confidence.

  L- shows that an individual level factor can influence conformity by interacting with situational variables. but asch didnt research the roles of individual factors