Asch- conformity to social roles

• what was Asch's aim?

  his aim was to examine the extent to which social pressure from a majority could affect the levels of conformity.
• how many students did he have?

  50
• where we his participants from?

  a uni in America, they were all men.
• what did his participants believe they were there for?

  a vision test
• what was Asch's method?

  used a line judgment task. a real naïve participant was placed in a room with 7 confederates who had already agreed on the answers they were going to say. 18 trials, 12/18 trials the confederates said the incorrect answer.
• what did Asch measure in his study?

  the number of times each participant conformed with the majority.
• what were Asch's results?

  on average 32% of the real participants conformed to the incorrect answer, 74% of participants conformed on at least one critical trial, 26% never conformed
• what was Asch's finding for the investigation?

  after he interviewed them he found that the participants knew the answer was wrong but went with the majority to fit in. this supports normative social influence.
• what were some issues with Asch's study?

  biased sample as it was ethnocentric, and androcentrism. artificial situation, cultural differences cannot be generalised, ethical issues- deception, low ecological validity, lack of populational validity.
• what were the variations for Asch's study?

  group size, unanimity, and task difficulty
• what does group size mean?

  the more people added the more people there is to conform/ not conform with may change answers depending on if more people go for their answer
• what does unanimity mean?


  the extent to which the participants of the majority agree with one another, if one confederates dissented then conformity rates would drop from 35% to 5%.
• what does task difficulty mean?


  if the questions were to get harder would it increase conformity levels.