Jenness's jelly bean study

• Aim of jenness's study

  to investigate how group discussions can affect people's judgement
• procedure of jenness's jelly bean study

  he got 101 psychology students, female and male. He showed them a jar of jelly beans and asked them to estimate the amount of jelly beans in the jar, they first had to do this by themselves. Then, they were put into groups to discuss how many jelly beans were in the jar and then finally they had to estimate again but this time by themselves
• results of jenness's jelly bean study

  he found that ppts final estimate was closer to the group estimate it was found that males changed their answer by 256 jelly beans and that females changed it by 382 jelly beans.
• conclusion of jenness's jelly bean study

  he found that ppts changed their estimate to their group estimate because they believed that the majority around them was correct. This shows us that people conform due to informational social influence
• When the participants had to give their final answer

  They had to write a report about what happened in their group and state their estimate
• Participants thought their group would see their estimate


  They changed it to the group estimate to not face social rejection and to fit in
• Jenness study


  • Lacks ecological validity
  • Fails to account for non-ambiguous tasks that happen in real life like Valentine's Day (everyone does not see the point but still buys flowers and chocolates)
• Asch's aim


  to investigate if high social pressure leads to conformity
• asch's methodology


  lab experiment
• asch's procedure


  he got 50 male American college students. He told them that they were taking part in a vision test. He put each participant into a group consisted of 7 confederates. each ppt had 18 trails and on 12 of the trails the confederates gave the incorrect answer
• asch's results


  ppts gave the same incorrect answer as the confederates on 32% of the trails. 75% gave an incorrect answer on at least one of the trails 26% never conformed He also had a control group which consisted of no confederates: and less than 1% of the ppts gave an incorrect answer
• asch's conclusion


  when he interviewed the ppts on why they conformed they said they knew the answer was wrong but they did it to be liked and to not faced social rejection. therefore this concludes that people conform via normative social influence to fit in
• Negative evaluations of Asch's study

  • Lacks ecological validity - the study was based on judgements of lines, therefore this does not demonstrate how normative social influence is shown in real life
  • Asch fails to explain why people drink and smoke around friends etc.
• Ethical issues with Asch's study

  • Deception - participants were told they were taking part in a vision test, but Asch had to do this to avoid demand characteristics and obtain valid results
  • Participants were not protected from harm - they faced high levels of stress when going against the majority
• Limitations of Asch's study

  • Lacks population validity - the study was on 50 male American college students, so it cannot be generalised to other countries, women, or men outside of college