Psychology - Conformity

• Conformity

  A change in a person's behavior or opinions as a result of real or imagined pressure from a person or group
• Solomon Asch's study on conformity

  • Participants were told they were taking part in a visual perception task
  • Participants were tested alongside Confederates (people pretending to be other participants)
  • Confederates gave the same incorrect response on critical trials
  • 32% of participants conformed and gave the clearly wrong response on critical trials
  • 75% of participants conformed on at least one critical trial
• Factors influencing conformity levels in Asch's study

  • Group size - conformity decreased as the number of Confederates decreased
  • Anonymity - participants conformed less when they could give their response in secret
  • Task difficulty - conformity increased when the task was made more difficult
• Asch's study has been criticised for being an artificial lab study, and the results may not apply to real-world situations
• Most examples of conformity happen around people we know, like friends, family or coworkers, but Asch's study only used groups of strangers
• Locus of control

  Where a person feels the power to control their life comes from - either inside themselves (internal locus of control) or outside forces (external locus of control)
• Expertise

  The more confident someone is with a topic, the less conformist they are likely to be
• A replication of Asch's study by Perrin and Spencer found that only 1 out of 396 participants conformed, in contrast to Asch's findings
• The lack of replication of Asch's results is a criticism of his original study