Asch (conformity)

Group size

- Whether the size of the group would be more important than the agreement of the group

- Asch found that with three confederates conformity to the wrong answer rose to 31.8%, but the addition of further confederates made little difference

- This suggests a small majority is not sufficient for influence to be exerted

• 1 confederate = 3%

• 2 confederates = 12.8%

• 3 confederates = 37%

• 15 confederates = 29%

Unanimity

- If the presence of another, non-conforming person would affect the participant's conformity

- Asch introduced a confederate who disagreed with the others, sometimes giving the right answer or the wrong answer

- Conformity was reduced by a quarter from the level it was when the majority was unanimous as a result of this

- The participants were enabled to behave more independently

• Dissenter = 5%

Task difficulty

- Asch made the line-judging task more difficult by making the stimulus line and the comparison lines more similar in length

- Conformity increased as a result of this, suggesting that ISI plays a greater role when the task becomes harder

- This is because the situation is more ambiguous, so participants are more likely to look to other group members for guidance, assuming they are right

Procedure

• Asch’s sample consisted of 123 male students from three different colleges in the USA, who believed they were taking part in a vision test.

• Asch used a line judgement task, where he placed one naïve participant in a room with seven to nine confederates (actors), who had agreed their answers in advance.

• The naïve participant was deceived and was led to believe that the other seven to nine people were also real participants.

• The naive participant was always seated second from last.

• In turn, each person had to say out loud which line (A, B or C) was most like the target line in length. The correct answer was always clear.

• Each participant completed 18 trials and the confederates gave the same incorrect answer on 12 trials, called critical trials.

• Asch wanted to see if the real participant would conform to the majority view, even when the answer was clearly incorrect.

Results

• On average, the real participants conformed to the incorrect answers on 37% of the critical trials.

• 74% of the participants conformed on at least one critical trial.

• 26% of the participants never conformed.

Limitation (1)

• Low ecological validity.

• In the experiment he used an artificial task to measure conformity - judging line lengths. Judging line lengths is a task that most people would not normally do in their everyday lives.

• This is a problem because the results cannot be generalised to other real life situations of conformity.

• If his study was done using a ‘real life’ situation/task, he may have got different results.

Limitation (2)

• One limitation of the study is that it used a biased sample.

• All the participants were American male university students who all belonged to the same sex, age group and occupation.

• This means that study lacks population validity and that the results cannot be generalised to females or older groups of people.

Strength

• Research support for task difficulty

• Lucas et al found apps were more likely to conform to answers of difficult maths questions than easy maths questions.

• Asch is correct that task difficulty affects conformity.

• HOWEVER support for individual differences as people with higher confidence in their maths conformed less.

Real world application

• understanding social influence in a range of settings, including group decision-making, conformity in political and cultural contexts, and the impact of social media on individual behavior and attitudes.