Conformity

• Asch's baseline procedure:

  Used to assess the extent to which people will conform to other's opinions even when obviously wrong.

  Procedure: 123 American men were tested. Each pps saw two large white cards. The line X is the standard line. The lines A, B and C are three comparison lines. One of the comparison lines is always clearly the same length as X.

  Findings: The pps agreed with the confederates 1/3 of the time. 25% of the pps never conformed.
• 1. Group size: varied the number of confederates from 1-15. Conformity increased with group size up to a certain point. Beyond 3 confederates, group size made little difference. Conformity rose to 32% with 3 confederates.
• 1. Unanimity: Asch introduced a confederate who disagreed with the other confederates. Fell to 5% conformity. The dissenter allowed the pps to behave more independently.
• 1. Task difficulty: Asch increased the similarity between the lines, making the task harder. Conformity increased, because the answer was more ambiguous and the pps assumed they were wrong and the others were right (ISI).
• [L]: Asch's tasks were artificial - they were trivial, so there was no reason to conform. This means that findings can't be generalised.
• [L]: pps were American men from the 1950s. The USA is an individualist culture, where people are more concerned about themselves than their social group, so tells us little about other cultures.
• [S]: there is support from other studies for the effects of task difficulty. The pps conformed more when the maths problems were harder.

  [L]: however, this study also found the conformity is more complex than Asch suggests. Pps with a higher confidence in their maths ability conformed less.