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Psychology Year 1
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Suravi Rao
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Cards (15)
Conformity
The act of matching attitudes,
beliefs
, and behaviors to group
norms
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Asch's baseline procedure
Devised by Solomon Asch (1951) to investigate the extent to which people will conform to the opinion of others, even in a situation where the answer is certain
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Asch's baseline procedure
1. Participants shown a
line
and asked to match it to one of
three
comparison lines
2. Majority of group (
confederates
) give an
incorrect
answer
3. Measure whether the naive participant conforms to the
majority
or gives the
correct
answer
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Variables investigated by Asch
Group size
Presence of a dissenting group member
Task difficulty
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Increasing group size
Increases
conformity
rate up to a point, with
3
confederates being enough to sway opinion
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Presence of a dissenting group member
Decreases
conformity
rate, as the naive participant is more likely to behave
independently
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Increasing
task
difficulty
Increases
conformity
, as the right answer becomes more
ambiguous
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Asch's
research increased our knowledge of why people
conform
, which may help avoid mindless destructive conformity
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Ethical issues should be considered, as
Asch's
participants were
deceived
and believed the other people involved were real
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W
Artificial situation and task
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One limitation of
Asch's
research is that the task and situation were
artificial
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Participants knew they were in a research study and may simply have gone along with what was expected (
demand characteristics
)
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The task of identifying lines was relatively
trivial
and therefore there was really no reason not to
conform
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According to
Susan Fiske
(2014),
'Asch's groups
were not very groupy', i.e. they did not really resemble groups that we experience in everyday life
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This means the findings do not
generalise
to real-world situations, especially those where the consequences of
conformity
might be important
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