AO3

• Research supporting ISI

  • Sherif demonstrated that people conform in ambiguous situations due to ISI
• Sherif's study

  1. Participants estimated how far a light moved individually

  2. Participants put into groups of three

  3. Two participants made similar judgements, one made very different judgement

  4. Participants converged on common judgement, one conformed to other two
• In ambiguous situations

  People will look to others for guidance, as ISI predicts
• Research supporting NSI

  • Asch (1956) was able to demonstrate that people conform in unambiguous situations due to NSI
• Asch's experiment

  1. Gave participants a task where the correct answer was obvious

  2. Tested participants in groups of seven

  3. Six members of the group were confederates instructed to give the incorrect answer on certain trials

  4. Found that on these trials, many of the participants conformed and gave the incorrect answer, even though the correct answer was obvious
• Participants explained: 'They had continued to trust their own private judgements but had changed their public behaviour in order to avoid disapproval from the group'
• NSI

  Often results in compliance
• Individual differences in ISI

  • It does not affect everyone's behaviour in the same way
  • Individuals who are more confident in their own abilities are less affected by ISI than individuals who are less confident
• Science and engineering students

  • Feel more confident in their own abilities and are therefore less likely to conform due to ISI
• Perrin & Spencer (1980) conducted a study involving science and engineering students and found very little evidence of conformity
• Normative social influence (NSI)


  • It does not affect everyone's behaviour in the same way
  • There are individual differences in how it affects people
• Individuals more concerned with being liked


  More affected by NSI
• nAffiliators


  Individuals who have a greater need to have relationships with others
• The desire to be liked underlies conformity for some people more than others
• One weakness is that it is possible that the findings of Asch are unique to a particular time and place
• Asch 


  Research conducted in America, the era of McCarthyism (a period of strong anti-communist feeling when people were scared to be different)
• Perrin & Spencer (1980) replicated Asch's study in England in the late 1970s
• Participants in Perrin & Spencer's studies

  • Science and engineering students
  • Youths on probation
• Confederates in Perrin & Spencer's studies

  • Probation officers
• Conformity is more likely

  When the perceived costs of non-conformity are high
• The costs of non-conformity were high in 1950s America, and this may explain the high levels of conformity found by Asch (1956)
• Weakness of Asch's conformity research

  • Research has suggested that there are important cultural differences in conformity
  • Findings of Asch's research are based upon an individualistic culture and can therefore not be generalised to collectivistic cultures
• Collectivistic cultures

  Emphasise the importance of the group (e.g. family and community) and value interdependence
• Smith & Bond (1998) analysed 133 conformity studies in 17 different countries
• Smith & Bond found that the collectivistic cultures included in their sample tended to show higher levels of conformity than the individualistic cultures
• Asch (1956) research


  Criticized for having ethical issues
• Real participants in Asch's study were deceived about the true purpose of the experiment
• Participants

  • Displayed signs of discomfort and stress during the critical trials
  • Some reported becoming worried that there was something wrong with their eyes
•  

  Asch’s research can be criticised for lacking validity. This is because his experiments were conducted in a controlled laboratory setting and required participants to judge the lengths of lines with no consequence for getting the answer wrong. This may explain why the participants felt willing to conform. On a more important task, we might expect conformity levels to drop. This suggests that the findings of Asch only tell us about conformity in specific circumstances and therefore lack ecological validity.   

   
• One weakness is that there is evidence that conformity to social roles is not automatic. For example, in the SPE, guard behaviour varied. There were some guards who acted sadistically, but others who were ‘good guards’. These ‘good guards’ did not harass or degrade the prisoners, and even did small favours for them. It has been argued that this shows that the guards chose how to behave, rather than automatically and blindly conforming to their social role as Zimbardo suggested. 

   
• One weakness is that it has been suggested that the behaviour of the guards and prisoners in the SPE was a response to powerful demand characteristics
• Demand characteristics


  Characteristics of a study that allow participants to guess the aim and change their behaviour accordingly
• Banuazizi & Movahedi (1975) presented some details of the SPE procedure to a large sample of students who had never heard of the study before
• The vast majority of these students correctly guessed that the purpose of the experiment was to show that ordinary people assigned to the role of guard or prisoner would act like real guards or prisoners
• The students also predicted that the guards would behave in a hostile and domineering way whilst the prisoners would act in a passive way
• This suggests that the findings of the SPE may lack internal validity, as they may be a result of demand characteristics
• Weakness

  The ethics of the SPE have been questioned
• The SPE was considered ethical, because it followed the guidelines of the Stanford University ethics committee and they approved it
• There was no deception as all participants were told in advance that their usual rights might be suspended
• Zimbardo acknowledged that perhaps the study should have been stopped earlier as so many of the participants were experiencing emotional distress