Asch’s line study

• The aim was to investigate the extent to which social pressure from a majority affected conformity.
• Procedure- sample consisted of 123 male students from a college in America, they believed that they were taking part in a vision test. He used a line judgement task where he placed one real participant in a room with five confederates. The real answer was always obvious. All 18 trials were completed and the confederates gave the incorrect answer on 12 of them.
• • Findings- participants conformed 32% of the trials where confederates gave the wrong answer
  • 75% of the sample confirmed to the majority on at least one trial
• • Evaluation- lacks ecological validity, people’s perception of lines does not reflect complexity of real life conformity.
• • Evaluation- lacks population validity, as only carried out on men so sample was gender bias and results can’t be applied to females.
• • Evaluation- Ethical issues, deception of participants were told the study was on perception of lines and couldn’t give consent, could cause participants to feel embarrassed and potentially put them through psychological harm.
• • Evaluation- despite ethical issues he did a debrief at the end of the study.
• • Evaluation- can link asch’s results to theory’s of why people may conform to the majority, like to fit in (NSI).
• Group size- the bigger the majority of confederates the more people conformed. There was low conformity when group size was smaller than 3. Any more than 3 and it increases by 30%. Conformity doesn’t increase in groups more than 4. 4 is considered the optimal group size.
• Group unanimity- more likely to confirm when the whole group agrees and gives the same answer, when one person gave different from others, conformity dropped. When joined by an other participant who gave the correct answer conformity fell to 5.5%.
• Task difficulty- when task made more difficult conformity increased. When asch altered the lines, conformity increased and it was harder to tell the difference Making participants uncertain.
• Answer in private- when participants allowed to answer in private, conformity decreases as there are fewer group pressures, NSI not as powerful as no fear of rejection.