Conformity ASCH

• Conformity is a change in a person's behaviour/opinions as a result of real or imagine pressure from a person/ group of people
• Group size - When Asch added more confederates, the size of the majority increases, in which conformity also increased but only up to a point, levelling off when the majority was greater than 3
• Unanimity - Extent to which all the members of the group agree. Ash's studies show that when the majority of the group was unanimous, the greatest degree of conformity was produced in naive p's
• Task difficulty - Asch's line-judging task became harder when it became more difficult to work out the correct answer. This is where conformity increased because naive p's assumed the majority is most likely to be right
• Asch found a curvilinear relationship between group size and conformity rate. With 3 confeds conformity rose to 31.8% but the presence of more made little difference.
• In one variation, Asch introduced a confed who disagreed with the majority, giving the correct answer. Genuine p's conformed less often in a presence of a dissenter. Rate of conformity was less than 1/4 when the majority was unanimous. This suggests influence of majority largely depends on whether the group is unanimous.
• Conformity rates increased as task was more ambiguous as it is natural to look to other people for guidance and assume they are right (ISI)
• Asch devised an experiment whereby there was an obvious answer to a line judgement task. If the p's gave an incorrect answer, it would be clear that this was due to group pressure.
• Baseline findings:

  • 36.8% of the time p's agreed to confeds incorrect answers
  • 2.5% never conformed
• Weaknesses of Asch study:

  • Artificial situation and task - P's knew they were in a research study and may have simply gone along with what's expected (demand characteristics)
  • All of Asch's p's were American men, even though his findings were generalised to both genders. However, research show that women may be more conformist in order to gain social approval.
• Strength of Asch's study:

  • Lucas et al asked p's to solve easy and hard mathematical problems and found p's conformed more often when problem was harder suggesting task difficulty is a factor that influences conformity.