asch

• Ash uses 123 US undergraduates take part in a study where, in groups all but one is a confederate (unknown to the pt) and asked which line out of 3 is then the same length as a standard line. On 12 of the 18 trials, the confederates gave the same wrong answer to see if the pts would conform. On 12 of the 18 trials, the average conformity rate was found to be 33%. ¼ of the pt never conformed. Asch carried out a number of variations of his original study to find out which variations had the biggest effects on conformity.
• One of the variables used by Asch was group size. Asch found little conformity when there were just 1 or 2 confederates, however under the pressure of 3, the proportion of conforming responses jumped to about 30%. Increases of group size after this, didn’t have much effect so it does make a difference, but only up to a certain point.
• Asch also tested the unanimity of the majority. When a real pt was given support from another pt or a confederate instructed to give the right answer, conformity dropped from 33% to 5.5%. If they gave a wrong answer different to everyone else conformity rates were 9%. Asch also found when the difficulty of the task increased, conformity rates also increased due to the answer being harder to pick out and so it is more likely to stick with what everyone else says.

   
• A problem with this study is that it may have been difficult to act convincingly and trick the pt. This was tested by a group of pt with glasses to wear while doing this experiment. 3 of them had one filter and one lone pt had a different filter. This meant that each pt viewed the same stimuli but one saw it differently causing them to judge it different from the rest. For female pt, the results closely matched those in the og Asch study.

  This suggests that the confederates in Asch’s study did act convincingly which therefore reinforced the validity of the findings.
• An issue with this study is that it is a biased sample.

  Asch used 123 male undergraduates in his study who all volunteered to take part. Volunteers may have more motivation and more time than those who didn’t take part, which can create volunteer bias. They are also male undergraduates and no females. Young people may behave differently to older people that could have taken part. This suggests that the results could be hard to generalise to the whole population as it only represents a certain type of person.
• Another point is that in Asch’s study, only 1/3 of the trials pt actually conformed.

  So, in 2/3 of the trials, the pt didn’t conform to what the confederates answers were. They stuck to their original judgement despite being faced with an overwhelming majority expressing very different answers to them.

  Asch therefore believed that instead of showing conformity, he ended up showing individual behaviour and the tendency for pt to stick to their own and original judgement.
• One last issue is the problem with group sizes.

  Asch had concluded that a majority of 3 was sufficient enough to allow pt to conform and therefore, most subsequential studies after this used 3 as a majority size. Bond 2005 points out that no studies have used a majority greater than 9.

  This suggests that we don’t know much about what bigger majority sizes will do to conformity as most studies used 3-4 and none over 9.