conformity ashes evaluation

• Limitation of Asch's research

  The task and situation were artificial
• Participants


  Knew they were in a research study and may simply have gone along with what was expected (demand characteristics)
• Task


  Identifying lines was relatively trivial and therefore there was really no reason not to conform
• Asch's groups


  Weren't very groupy, i.e. they didn't resemble groups that we experience in everyday life
• Artificial task and situation, trivial task, and non-groupy groups

  Findings don't generalise to real world situations, especially those where the consequences of conformity might be important
• Asch's participants were American men


  This is a limitation of the study
• Other research suggests that women may be more conformist, possibly because they are concerned about social relationships, and being accepted (Neto 1995)
• The US is an individualist culture where people are more concerned about themselves rather than their social group
• Similar conformity studies conducted in collectivist cultures such as China where the social group is more important than the individual have found that conformity rates are higher (Bond and Smith 1996)
• Task difficulty


  One strength of Asch's research is support from other studies for the effects of task difficulty
• Study by Todd Lucas et al. (2006)


  • Participants were asked to solve easy and hard maths problems
  • Participants conformed more often when the problems were harder
• Task difficulty


  Affects conformity
• This shows that an individual level factor can influence conformity by interacting with situational variables (e.g. task difficulty)
• But Asch did not research the roles of individual factors