Majority influence- Asch (1951)

• Aim: Asch designed an experiment to see whether people would conform to a majority's incorrect answer in an unambiguous task
• Procedure:

  • he used a line judgement task, he placed one naive ppt in a room with 7-9 actors, who agreed their answers in advance
  • the naive ppt was deceived and was led to believe that the other seven to nine people were also real ppts. The naive ppt was always seated second from last this is so they can hear all the answers
  • In turn, each person had to say out loud which line (A,B or C) was the most like the target line (X) in length. The correct answer was always clear.
  • Each ppt completed 18 trials and the Confederates gave the same incorrect answer on 12 trials, called critical trials.
• Findings:

  • In the 12 critical trials, participants conformed to the majority (gave the same wrong answer) 36.8% of the time
  • 75% conformed at least once
  • 25% never conformed at all
• Conclusion:

  Asch interviewed his participants after, he discovered the majority of participants who had conformed had continued privately to trust their own perceptions and judgements, but changed their public behaviour, giving incorrect answers to avoid disapproval from other members. This demonstrates NSI and is also linked to compliance.
• Asch's experiment can be used as supporting evidence for conformity from the research methods used by Asch. An example of this is the study was conducted as a lab experiment, meaning they were able to ensure a high control over extraneous variables such as order of ppts answering and distance between the lines. He was able to establish direct cause and effect between variables being investigated (in Asch's group size variation, size majority and conforming rate). So one strength is that it can be used as supporting research for conformity as it has high internal validity.
• A weakness is that the findings may only apply to certain situations. E.g. ppts had to answer out loud and were with a group of strangers who they wanted to impress, meaning that conformity was higher. But research found that conformity was higher when the majority of the group were friends rather than strangers, meaning that conformity changes.

  This suggests that findings are not valid and may tell us about real life as results fail to generalise to every-day situations, especially those where consequences of conformity are important.
• Weakness of Asch‘s experiment was that he did not fully adhere to the code of ethics. E.g. ppts were not protected from psychological harm as they were stressed when they disagreed with the majority. Asch decieved the students volunteers claiming they were taking part in a ‘vision‘ test; the real purpose was to see how the naive ppt would conform to the behaviour of the confederates. Ppts didn’t know that the other ppts were confederates. This is a problem because he was not respecting his ppts who offered to take part in his research, however, deception was necessary to produce valid results
• A strength is that the relatively short term costs to the ppts can be outweighed by the importance of the results. E.g. it can be largely explained by NSI according to the findings from the original study. This clearly implies that, the ethical issues regarding this experiment can be overlooked and it is a strong example of research into conformity as it overall the validity of Asch's research will not be affected and as a whole psychology is bettered and further studies of conformity can be built upon this research to support and explain conformity.