1. Asch's study

• Describe Asch's baseline procedure

  Asch used a procedure to test to what extent people conform due to others opinions. 123 American men were tested with one real participant amongst a group of 4/5 confederates with the pps always being the second to last to answer. They were tested on the length of lines.
• How did group size affect the study as a variable?

  Asch increased and decreased group size. When the group size of the group was below 3 the levels of conformity decrease however, when the group size was 3 or above the levels of conformity increased.
• How did unanimity affect the study as a variable?

  In Asch's original study, the confederates all gave the same incorrect answer. In one variation one confederate gave the correct answer throughout and conformity dropped to 5%. This demonstrates that if a participant has support for their belief, they will resist conformity. Influences the majority.
• How did task difficulty affect the study as a variable?

  In the original study, the correct answer was always obvious. In another variation, Asch made the lines closer in length to increase difficulty and found that rates of conformity increased. This is likely to be the result of informational social influence and fear that they will be wrong. They look to others for guidance.
• Outline one strength of Asch's research

  Lucas et al. (06): asked pps to solve ‘easy’ and ‘hard’ maths problems. PPs were given answers from three other students (not actually real). Findings: pps conformed more often (i.e. agreed with the wrong answers) when the problems were harder. This provides support for Asch’s variation on task difficulty. As difficulty increases people tend to rely on the opinions of others to make their decision and thus conform. 
• Outline one limitation of Asch's research

  One weakness of Asch’s research is the presence of confounding variables. Neto (95) found women may be more conformist, possibly because they are concerned about social relationships and being accepted. This threatens the internal validity of the research as Asch did not account for this in his original research as he only studied male pps. As a result, his original findings cannot explain those found by Neto (95), and also cannot be generalised to women in the general population.
• Outline one limitation of Asch's research

  A further confounding variable was raised by Bond & Smith (96) who found conformity studies conducted in collectivist cultures (such as China where the social group is more important than the individual) have found conformity rates are higher. Culture also appears to be an important factor in determining conformity which cannot be explained by Asch’s restricted sample of American male students.
• Outline one limitation of Asch's research

  The task itself can be considered artificial and Fiske (2014) claimed ‘Asch’s groups were not very groupy’ - they did not really resemble groups that we experience in everyday life. In reality, people spend time with friends and family, or they may be tied together by being members of the same institution. This could affect how likely we are to conform.
• Additionally, pps knew they were in a research study, causing demand characteristics to arise. If this were true, Asch is no longer measuring the effect of group pressure on behaviour, instead it is the willingness of the pp to please the researcher. As a result, both the internal validity and the external validity is reduced.