Conformity - Asch (1951)

• Define 'conformity'

  A change in a person's behaviour or opinions as a result of real or imagined pressure from a person or group of people.
• Asch's baseline study

  - 123 American men were tested in a group with other participants (confederates).

  - Participants were given an image of a line and then asked to identify the line which was identical out of three comparison lines. One of the comparison lines was clearly identical while the other two were clearly dissimilar.

  - On each trial, the participants had to verbally say which line they thought was identical.

  - Participants were tested in groups of 6 - 8 and were always seated last or second to last.

  - The confederates all gave the same scripted incorrect answer.

  
  

  - On average, the participants conformed with the confederates' answers 32% of the time.

  - There were individual differences; 25% of participants never conformed.
• Group size

  - Asch varied the number of confederates so that the group size would be between 2 and 16. He found a curvilinear relationship - conformity increased with group size but only up to a certain point.

  - With 1 confederate, the conformity rate was 3% and with 3 confederates, conformity rose to 31.8%. After this point, the addition of more confederates made little difference.

  - This suggests that most people are very sensitive to others' views as few confederates was enough to change opinion.
• Unanimity

  - Asch introduced a confederate who disagreed with the other confederates. In this variation, he gave the correct answer, or another incorrect answer.

  - Conformity rate decreased in the presence of a dissenter from 32% to 5%. The presence of a dissenter seemed to free the participant and encourage them to behave independently (social support). Conformity rate still decreased even when the dissenter disagreed with the participant.

  - This suggests that majority influence depends largely on if they are unanimous in their opinion; non-conformity is more likely if there are cracks in the opinion.
• Task difficulty

  - Asch increased the difficulty of the task by making the stimulus line and the comparison lines more similar to each other in length.

  - This made it harder for participants to judge which ones were identical. Asch found that conformity increased.

  - The situation was more ambiguous, so it was unclear to participants what the right answer was. Therefore, they looked to other participants for guidance, assuming they were wrong and others were correct (ISI).
• Evaluating Asch's research: Artificial situation and task

  - Participants knew they were in a research study and may have simply gone along with what was expected of them, i.e. demand characteristics. The task Asch set was quite trivial and there was no reason to not conform.

  - Fiske (2014) said that Asch's groups didn't really resemble groups that we experience in everyday life.

  - This means that findings don't generalise to real-life situations (lacking external validity), especially those where the consequences of conformity may be important.
• Evaluating Asch's research: Ethical issues


  - Asch's research has increased our knowledge about why we conform, which can help us avoid mindless destructive conformity.

  - Participants were also deceived as they thought that the confederates were genuine participants.

  - Despite this, we should weigh up the ethical costs against the benefits to society; Asch's study taught us about reasons for why we conform which has had a large impact on society and therefore outweighs the small ethical issue of deception.
• Evaluating Asch's research: Limited application


  - Asch's study was androcentric (only carried out on men).

  - Neto (1995) suggests that women may be more likely to conform, perhaps because they are more worried about social relationships and acceptance.

  - The study was also ethnocentric. The US has an individualist culture - studies conducted in collectivist cultures (such as China and Japan) had higher conformity rates (Bond and Smith (1996)).

  - This means that Asch's findings cannot be generalised to women and collectivist cultures.
• Evaluating Asch's research: Research support (with counterpoint)

  - Asch's research has support from other studies into the implications of task difficulty.

  - Lucas et al. (2006) asked participants to solve maths problems of varying difficulty. The participants conformed more often to confederates when the questions were harder.

  - This shows that Asch was correct in claiming that task difficulty affects conformity.

  
  

  - Counterpoint: Lucas et al. (2006) found that conformity is more complex than Asch suggested.

  - Participants with high maths ability had more confidence and conformed less on harder questions than those with lower confidence.

  - This shows that individual differences also need to be accounted for - there is an individual-level factor that is able to influence conformity by interacting with situational variables, such as task difficulty, however Asch did not research these individual factors.