Conformity: Asch's research

• Asch's procedure:

  123 male American undergraduates in groups of 6; 1 true participant and 5 confederates. Participants and confederates were presented with 4 lines; 3 comparison lines and 1 standard line. They were asked to state which of three lines was the same length as a standard line. The real participant always answered last or second to last. Confederate would give the same incorrect answer for 12 out of 18 trials.
• Asch's findings:

  Overall, 25% of the participants did not conform on any trials, which means that 75% conformed at least once.
• What were Asch's three variations of his original procedure?

  1. Group size
  2. Unanimity
  3. Task difficulty
• How did group size affect Asch's research?

  Asch increased the size of the group by adding more confederates, thus increasing the size of the majority. Conformity increased with group size, but only up to a point, levelling off when the majority was greater than three.
• How did unanimity affect Asch's research?

  The extent to which all the members of a group agree. In Asch's studies, the majority was unanimous when all the confederates selected the same comparison line. This produced the greatest degree of conformity in the naïve participants.
• How did task difficulty affect Asch's research?


  Asch's line-judging task is more difficult when it becomes harder to work out the correct answer. Conformity increases because naïve participants assume that the majority is more likely to be right.
• AO3 - A child of its time:

  Perrin and Spencer (1980) repeated Asch's original study with engineering students in the UK. Only one student conformed in a total of 396 trials. It is possible that the 1950s were an especially conformist time in America. But society has changed greatly since then, and people are possibly less conformist today. This means that the Asch effect is not consistent across situations and may not be consistent across time.
• AO3 - Artificial situation and task:

  Participants knew they were in a research study and may simply have gone along with the demands of the situation (demand characteristics). The task of identifying lines was relatively trivial and therefore there was really no reason not to conform. Also, although the naïve participants were members of a 'group', it didn't really resemble groups that we are part of in everyday life.
• AO3 - Limited application of findings:

  Only men were tested by Asch. Other research suggests that women might be more conformist, possibly because they are more concerned about social relationships than men are. The men in Asch's study were from the United States, an individualist culture. Similar conformity studies conducted in collectivist cultures have found that conformity rates are higher. Asch's findings may only apply to American men because he didn't take gender and cultural differences into account.
• AO3 - Ethical issues:

  The naïve participants were deceived because they thought the other people involved in the procedure (the confederates) were also genuine participants themselves.