asch variations

• weakness -

  Asch did not fully adhere to the code of ethics.

  Asch deceived the student volunteers claiming they were taking part in a 'vision' test; the real purpose was to see how the 'naive' participant would conform to the behaviour of the confederates. However, the ethical cost should be weighted up against the benefits gained from the study.

  This is a problem because he was not respecting his participants who had offered to take part in his research; however, deception was necessary to produce valid results.
• weakness -

  Another limitation of Asch is his study has low ecological validity.

  In the experiment he used an artificial task to measure conformity - judging line lengths. Judging line lengths is a task that most people would not normally do in their everyday lives

  This is a problem because the results cannot be generalized to other real life situations of conformity. If his study was done using a ‘real life’ situation/task, he may have got different results.
• weakness -

  One limitation of the study is that it used a biased sample.

  All the participants were American male university students who all belonged to the same sex, age group and occupation.

  This means that study lacks population validity and that the results cannot be generalised to females or older groups of people.
• weakness -

  Asch’s findings may lack temporal validity.

  Perrin and Spencer (1980) repeated Asch’ study with engineering students in the UK and found that one student conformed in nearly 400 trials.

  This is a limitation of Asch’s research as it may means that the effect observed is not consistent across situations or time and is therefore not a fundamental feature of human behaviour.