CONFORMITY:

• LIMITATION:

  • task and situation were artificial.
  • Pp knew they were in a research study and may simply have gone along with what was expected (demand characteristics)
  • Task of identifying lines was relatively trivial and therefore there was really no reason not to conform.
  • Also, according to Fiske (2014), 'Asch's groups were not very groupy', i.e. they did not really resemble groups that we experience in everyday life

  Means the findings do not generalise to real-world situations, especially those where the consequences of conformity might be important
• STRENGTH:

  • support from other studies for the effects of task difficulty
  • For example, Lucas et al. (2006) asked their participants to solve

  'easy' and '"hard' maths problems.

  • Participants were given answers from three other students (not actually real). The participants conformed more often (i.e. agreed with the wrong answers) when the problems were harder

  This shows Asch was correct in claiming that task difficulty is one variable that affects conformity
• COUNTERPOINT:

  • Lucas et al's study found that conformity is more complex than Asch suggested
  • Participants with high confidence in their maths abilities conformed less on hard tasks than those with low confidence

  This shows that an individual-level factor can influence conformity by interacting with situational variables (e.g. task difficulty). But Asch did not research the roles of individual factors.