Asch's study on Conformity

• Asch’s study was conducted to investigate the extent to which people conform to group pressure.
• Asch studed 123 American male undergraduates and gave participants 2 large cards at a time, one card had a a standardised line and the other had 3 comparison lines. On the first few trials, the confederates gave correct answers. Confederates were they instructed to give the same wrong answer on the same 12 trials out of 18.
• The findings of Ach's were that participants that participants gave the wrong answer 36.8% of the time. (Out of the 12 critical trials, they gave a wrong answer 36.8% of the time).

  • 25% did not conform on any of the trials.
  • This means that 75% conformed at least once. This result is called the Asch Effect, when participants conform even when the situaion unambiguous.
• Curvy-linear is a line that is curved but not curved in all directions.
• Asch variations: Group size, Task difficulty & Unanimity.
• Group Size - Asch wanted to know whether the suze of the gorup would be more importnant than the agreement of the group. He varied the number of confederates from 1-15 (total group size was 2-16). Asch found a curvlinear relationship between gorup size & comformity rate.

  • 1 or 2 confederates = low conformity
  • 3 confederates = 31.8%
  • 7 conferderates = 36.8%
• Unanimity - Asch wondered if the presence of a non-conforming person would affect the naive participants conformity. He introduced a confederate who disagrees with the other variation. In one, they gave the correct answer and in the other, they gave the other incorrect answer.

  • He asked the confederates to disagree with the other confederates; sometimes he gave the right answer sometimes he gave the wrong answer.
  • Presence of a dissenting confederate reduced conformity to 25%
  • Therefore conformity to the majority depends on the group being unanimous.
• Task Difficulty - Asch wanted to know if making the task harder would lead to greater compliance.

  • Increased the difficulty and made the line-judging task harder by making the stimulus line and the comparison lines similar to each other in length.
  • Became harder for the genuine participants to see differences between the lines
  • Asch found that conformity increased when the task was more difficult.
  • This suggest that informational social influence plays a part when the tasks become more difficult because people want to be right.