Asch's research

• Procedure:

  • 123 male American Undergraduates were tested
  • 5-7 participants per group
  • Each group was presented with a standard line and three comparison lines. Participants had to say out loud which comparison line matched the standard line in length. In each group, there was only one try participant and the rest were confederates
• The participants had to answer in the same order, with the real participant always answering last
• The confederates were asked to give the same incorrect answer on 12 of the 18 trials
• The true participants conformed on 32% of the critical trials where confederates gave the wrong answer. Additionally, 75% of the sample conformed to the majority on at least one trial
• Evaluation:

  • Sampling issues: gender bias and cultural relativism
  • deception as the participants were not told the true aim of the story and therefore could not give informed consent. However, Asch did inform them about the aim in the debrief
  • Participants may have also been put at psychological harm due to embarrassment of when the true nature of the experiment was revealed
• Asch's variables:

  1. Group size
  2. Task difficulty
  3. Unanimity
• Asch’s findings are consistent with other research which finds conformity rates decline when the majority answer is not unanimous. In other words, if the majority all agree, the participant is more likely to conform to the group than if there is some disagreement. Asch found that the presence of even just one confederate that goes against the majority's choice can reduce conformity as much as 80%
• Increasing the size of the group tended to increase conformity – up to a point. In trials with just one confederate and one participant, conformity rates were low. Increasing the number of confederates to 2 also increased conformity to 12.8% and increasing the number of confederates to 3 increased conformity even further to 32% (the same as the original study). However, adding extra confederates beyond this did not increase conformity.
• Increasing the difficulty of the task was also found to increase conformity. Asch adjusted the lengths of the lines in the study above to make it either more easy or more difficult to see which line was closest in length to the original line. If the difference between the incorrect answer and the correct answer was very small (and thus harder to notice), participants were more likely to conform to the incorrect answers of the majority.