Asch

Aim

To see if participants would feel pressured into conforming to an obviously wrong answer

Procedure

• Participants were asked to match 1 standard line to 3 possibilities

• Control study - 36 participants taking part in 20 trials each, only 3 mistakes made over 720 trials

• Experiment study - 50 male college students tested in groups of 7,8 or 9. All members of group were confederates which gave wrong answer on certain critical trials (12/18).

• Participant was always last or 2nd to last to guess

Findings

• 32% basic conformity rate

• 5% conformed on every critical trial

• 74% conformed at least once

• 26% didn’t conform at all

Conclusions

NSI - participants only conforming so they don’t look different means they didn’t internalise answer & would return to original belief

AO3 No 1 - useful applications

• Useful applications

• Public voting may be affected by NSI & it may be better to vote privately

• Taken on board by trade unions who no longer ask for show of hands when voting

• Instead now use private ballots, showing that knowledge of NSI has improved democratic process

AO3 No 2 - Culture bias

• Culture bias

• Smith & Bond analysed 100+ studies like Asch’s & found collectivist cultures more likely to conform than individualist cultures.

• Asch’s research was done on individualist culture so less conformity is expected however in a collectivist culture more conformity is expected due to emphasis on inter-dependance

• Asch’s results don’t generalise to non-western cultures or collectivist sub-cultures in western society

AO3 No 3 - Mundane realism

• Lacks mundane realism

• Judging length of a line is meaningless to participants & not an emotive issue

• However people may not conform in a real life situation which may involve compromise of their values, for example laughing at an offensive joke.

• Meaning someone may be less likely to conform in real life & that Asch may have overestimated conformity, so his results aren’t very generalisable