Asch's Research

• Asch's Baseline Procedure :

  123 American men were tested and each one was in a group with other apparent participants (who were actually confederates.)

  
• When there is an obvious right answer, most people will not conform to the majority if everyone else gives the same wrong answer.
• As the number of confederates increased so did the percentage of participants who gave the wrong answer.
• BASELINE FINDINGS:

  On average, the geniune participants with confederates' incorrect answers agreed about 36.8% of the time- about a third of them conformed to the wrong answer.
• Variables investigated by Asch (1955):

  Asch investigated other variables by extending his original baseline study to see if this would lead to an increase or a decrease in conformity.
• Group size


  The number of people in a group
• Asch's experiment


  1. Varied the number of confederates from 1-15

  2. Measured conformity to the wrong answer
• Group size


  Caused conformity to increase, but only up to a point
• Group size


  • With 3 confederates, conformity to the wrong answer rose to 31.8%
  • More confederates eventually stopped making a difference
• Most people are very sensitive to the views of others as just one or two confederates were easily able to sway opinion
• 2. UNANIMITY

  • Asch wondered if the presence of a non conforming person would affect the conformity of a participant.
  • He introduced a confederate that disagreed with other confederates.
  • The participant conformed less in the presence of a dissenter.
  • Rate of conformity decreased to less than a quarter of the level it was when the majority of the choices were unanimous.
  • This suggests that the influence of the majority epend to a large extent on it being anonymous.
• 3. TASK DIFFICULTY

  • Asch wanted to now whether making the task harder would affect the degree of conformity.
  • He increased the difficulty of the line judging task by making it harder for the participants to see the differences between the lines.
  • Conformity increased in this case. This is because it is an ambiguous situation when the task becomes harder as it is natural to look to other people for guidance when in an unclear situation. (KNOWN AS ISI)
• EVALUATION (limitation)

  A limitation of Asch's research is that the task and situation were artificial. Participants knew that they were in a research study and may simple have just gone along with what was expected due to demand characteristics. Cannot really generalise this to real world situations.
• EVALUATION (limitation)

  Another limitation to the research is that the only research sample that was used was American men. The US is evidently an individualist culture (where people are mor concerned about themselves than their social group). This means that Asch's study tells us little about women and conformity, and also about conformity in other cultures.
• EVALUATION (strength)

  
  

  A strength of Asch's research is that there is support from other studies on the effects of task difficulty. (TODD LUCAS et al. 2006) They were asked to solve "easy" and "hard" maths problems. This shows that Asch was correct in this conclusion of his.
• FURTHER EVALUATION (limitiation/strength)?


  A limitation of this study is obviously that participants were deceived in order to gather this information. They were told that the confederates were also real participants, and were deceived in this way. However, without this deception, results would not have been able to be obtained.