AO3

• Strength of Normative Social Influence

  • Supporting evidence from Asch: confederates gave unanimous wrong answers when asked to compare a standard line to 3 other lines. Ps conformed 33% of the time giving an answer that was clearly wrong. When interviewed, ps said they felt self-conscious going against the group and were afraid of disapproval. Supports NSI, as they conformed because they wanted to fit in with the group.
• Strength of Informational Social Influence

  • Supporting evidence from Lucas: ps were given maths problems that were either easy or difficult. Found that conformity levels to incorrect answers were higher when questions were harder, especially if ps rated their maths ability as poor. Supports ISI as ps conformed when they were uncertain, and thought the group was right
• Weakness of Asch: Child of its time

  It is possible that Asch’s findings are unique because the research took place in a particular period of US history when conformity was high.

  For example, Perrin and Spencer repeated Asch’s study in the UK in the 1980’s using engineering students. They found only 1 conforming response

  out of a total of 396 trials. This is a limitation of Asch’s research because it means that his research lacks

  temporal or historical validity. In other words, it is not consistent

  across time.
• Weakness of Asch: Methodological issues

  Demand characteristics are cues in the environment that may cause the participant to change their behaviour. This means that because participants were aware they were taking part in a study, they may have behaved unnaturally. This is a problem as it would lower the study’s internal validity. Additionally, the line length task lacks mundane realism. The task of identifying lines is trivial and therefore there was no real reason not to conform. Furthermore, the groups did not really resemble groups that occur in real life.
• Weakness of Asch: Limited application of findings

  Asch used an all-male sample.

  Other research suggests that women might be more conformists, possibly because they are more concerned about social relationship than men. Another issue is that the men in Asch’s study were all from the United States. Conformity studies conducted in China, where the social group is very important, found much higher conformity rates.

  This suggests that Asch’s finding may only apply to American men because he did not take gender and cultural differences into account.
• Weakness of Zimbardo: Ethical Issues 


  Zimbardo’s procedure broke several ethical issues: Right to withdraw: On one occasion a student spoke to Zimbardo because he wanted to leave the study. However, Zimbardo responded to him as a superintendent (instead of a researcher) and persuaded him to remain. Protection from harm: Five of the prisoners left the experiment early because of their adverse reactions to the physical and mental torment. Furthermore, some of the guards reported feelings of anxiety and guilt, as a result of their actions during the study.
• Weakness of Zimbardo: Lacks reliability 


  Reicher and Haslam (2006) conducted a modern-day replication of the original

  study in the UK (The BBC prison study). Their findings were very different to those of Zimbardo. In this replication, the prisoners took control of the mock prison and subjected the guards to a campaign of harassment and disobedience. This is an issue as it demonstrates that findings are not consistent, and that people may not conform to social roles in modern society.
• Strength of Zimbardo: Application to modern day events

  Zimbardo argues that the same conformity to social role effect was evident in the study was also evident in Abu Ghraib, a military prison in Iraq notorious for the torture and abuse of Iraq prisoners by US soldiers in 2003 and 2004.

  Zimbardo believed that the guards who committed the abuses were the victims of situation factors that made abuse more likely. This is a strength of Zimbardo’s research as it can give us insight into conformity

  of social roles in modern day events