Asch & Variables Affecting Conformity

What was Asch’s aim?

To investigate whether individuals would conform to the majority and give an obviously incorrect answer due to group pressure.

what as the sample size?

123 male American undergraduate students, each placed with 6-8 confederates.

What was the procedure?

Participants were shown a standard line and 3 comparison lines, and has to state which matched the standard line. On 12 out of 18 critical trials. All confederates gave the same incorrect answer before the participants responded.

What was the results?

Participants conformed to the incorrect majority on 36.8% of critical trials.

75% confirmed at least once

25% didn’t conform at all.

What did asch’s conclude?

People will sometimes conform even when the answer is obvious, because they want to be accepted (Normative Social Influence) or think the group is right (informational Social Influence).

Strength of Asch’s study of conformity

High reliability there- asch’s used a highly controlled procedure. The same line cards, numbers of trials and confederates for every participants. This makes the study is easy to replicate and similar results from replications suggests the finding are reliable.

Cross-culture evidence - Replications such as smith and Bond found similar patterns but also showed cultural differences, with higher conformity in collectivist cultures. This supports the idea that cultural influences conformity, adding external validity.

Weaknesses of Asch’s study of conformity

Artificial task - matching lines in a lab is not real life situations where conformity happens. This reduces ecological validity and means the results may not fully reflect everyday group pressure.

Demand Characteristics - the task was very simple, so some participants may have guessed the aim and gone along with the group for the sake of the experiment. This lowers internal validity because their behaviour might not represent genuine conformity.

Low Temporal Validity - this study took place is 1950s America, a time when social conformity was high. Later studies found lower levels of conformity, so Asch’s results may not apply to modern society.

strength Normative Social Influence (NSI) - evaluation

Research Support - There is Research Support to support it. Asch’s found that participants conformed to confederates giving an incorrect answer on a simple line comparison task 37% of the time. People only usually make mistakes in this task 1% of the time. This shows that majority can influence individuals to conform even on obvious tasks suggesting they privately knew the answers, but behaved in a different way. Giving credit to the explanation.

Explains Everyday Behaviour - normative social Influence (NSI) explains many real life situations, such as peer pressure among teenagers or following trends. This makes the explanation useful for understanding social behaviour outside or experiments.

Weakness Normative Social Influence (NSI) - evaluation

Generalisable - A limitation of this explanation is that the research supporting it lacks generalisability. Asch’s study was conducted with only male participants and therefore cannot generalise the finding to the female population thus suggests normative social influence may not be a credible explanation for why women conform and more research needs to be conducted to investigate it.

Mundane Realism - Research supporting NSI such as Asch’s line study, lacks mundane realism. Judging line lengths is an artificial task, so it may not reflect how people conform in real life situations like peer pressure. This lowers the external validity of the explanation.

The effect of group size on conformity

1 confederate conformity reached = 3%

2 confederates conformity reached = 12.8%

3 confederates conformity reached = 31.8

This suggests conformity peaks with 3 confederates. Adding more confederates beyond 3 made little difference.

How does unanimity affect conformity?

When all confederate agreed, conformity was high. If one confederate gave the correct answer, conformity fell sharply to 5%. If one gives a different wrong answer, it dropped to 9%. This shows the unanimity is a key factor in conformity, and the presence of a dissenter gives participants confidence to resist group pressure.

The effect of task difficulty on conformity

When the task was made harder by making the lines more similar, conformity increased. This suggests that when tasks are ambiguous, people conform due to informational social influence (ISI - looking to others for guidance). When tasks are easy, conformity is more likely due to normative social influence (NSI - wanting to be accepted)