Asch

• When did Asch carry out his study

  1951
• What was the aim of Asch's study?

  To investigate the effect of social influence in an unambiguous situation
• What was Asch's procedure?

  - Had 123 American male students as participants. Each one was placed in a room with 6 - 8 confederates

  
  

  - Participants were shown a standard line and asked to state aloud which comparison line (A, B or C) was most like the standard line. The answer was always obvious.

  
  

  - The confederates has pre-agreed their responses but the real participant was not aware of this

  
  

  - The confederates began the trials by giving the correct answer but then they began to make 'errors'

  
  

  - There were 18 trials and in 12 the confederates gave the wrong answer

  
  

  - There was also a control condition where there were no confederates, only 'real participants
• What were the results of Asch's line experiment?

  • 75% conformed at least once
  • 36.8% went along with the group on a majority of the trials
  • 25% remained completely independent
  • When tested alone, subjects got more than 98% of the judgements correct
• What can be concluded from Asch's study?


  Participants will conform to avoid rejection (ie: normative social influence)
• Name the three variations of Asch's study

  - Group size

  - Unanimity

  - Difficulty of task
• What did Asch change in the group size variation?

  Changed the group size
• What were the results of the group size variation of Asch's study?

  - One confederate: 3% conformity rate

  - Two confederates: 13% conformity rate

  - Three or more confederates: 32% conformity rate
• What group size gave optimum conformity levels?

  - With a majority of 3

  
  

  - Increasing the size of the majority beyond 3 did not increase the levels of conformity found
• How did Asch change the unanimity of his study?


  He included a confederate who disagreed with the rest
• What were the results of the results when unanimity was varied in Asch's study?

  Conformity dropped to 5%

  
  

  The participant had more confidence if the group were not unanimous
• How did Asch increase the difficulty of the experiment?

  He made the comparison lines and the standard lines more similar
• How did increasing the difficulty of the study affect conformity?

  - Conformity increased

  - Social influence plays a role when a task is ambiguous
• What is the strength of Asch's study?

  Deutsche and Gerrard's variation of Asch's research
• Outline Deutsche and Gerrard's variation of Asch's research


  They asked participants to write down their answer to the task and then throw the paper away
• What were the results of Deutsche and Gerrard's variation?

  Conformity dropped to 5%
• Why is Deutsche and Gerrard's variation a strength of Asch's research?

  It shows that individuals in Asch's original study were conforming to be accepted rather than to be right
• Name the weaknesses of Asch's study

  - Lacks temporal validity

  - Small sample size

  - Lacks ecological validity
• How does Asch's study lack temporal validity?


  - People today would not react in the same way and would be less likely to conform

  
  

  - Perrin and Spencer's 1980 replication of Asch, which was conducted in the UK and used engineering students, found that only 1 of the 396 participants conformed
• Why is it not ideal that Asch's sample size was so small?

  - There may be gender differences in conformity

  
  

  - There may be cultural differences. Asch's study was conducted in an individualist culture but collectivist cultures may be even more conformist

  
  

  - It is difficult to generalise the data
• Why does Asch's study lack ecological validity?

  - The task set would have been novel and unrealistic to the participants