Psychology Year 1

    Cards (15)

    • Conformity
      The act of matching attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors to group norms
    • 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
    • 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
    • Variables investigated by Asch
      • Group size
      • Presence of a dissenting group member
      • Task difficulty
    • Increasing group size
      Increases conformity rate up to a point, with 3 confederates being enough to sway opinion
    • Presence of a dissenting group member
      Decreases conformity rate, as the naive participant is more likely to behave independently
    • Increasing task difficulty
      Increases conformity, as the right answer becomes more ambiguous
    • Asch's research increased our knowledge of why people conform, which may help avoid mindless destructive conformity
    • Ethical issues should be considered, as Asch's participants were deceived and believed the other people involved were real
    • W
      Artificial situation and task
    • One limitation of Asch's research is that 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)
    • The task of identifying lines was relatively trivial and therefore there was really no reason not to conform
    • 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
    • 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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