Asch's original study

what was Asch’s aim ?

investigate the the extent social pressure from group affects conformity in unambiguous situations

how big was his sample ?

123 men

where were the men from ?

swarthmore college in the USA

what did the students believe they were taking part in ?

vision test

how many confederates were placed with the naive real participant ?

6-8

what was the real participants placement in the seating?

second to last or last

what was the task ?

each person had to say aloud which line (A,B,C) was most similar to the target line

how many trials did each real participant complete ?

18

how many trials did the confederates give the wrong answer ? what were these trials called ?

12 critical trials

on average how many participants conformed to incorrect answers in critical trials ?

32%

how many participants conformed at least once?

74%

how many participants never conformed?

26%

within the control group , how many gave wrong answer ?

less than 1%

what did Asch do after the experiment ?

interviewed to find out why they conformed

what did the participants say the reasoning behind conforming was ?

they knew their answers were wrong but went along with group to fit in or to avoid social rejection

what does Asch’s interview findings show about how participants complied ?

conformed due to normative social influence

what is a weakness of Asch’s study? hint ( setting)

• Line judgement task - artifical task

• doesn’t reflect everyday - lacks mundane realism

• hard to generalise to real life eg start smoking around friends

• low ecological validity

what is another weakness of Asch’s study ? hint ( effect on participants )

• ethically questionable

• deception and potential harm caused afterwards

• however did require deception to completethe study - demand characteristics would hinder results

• psychological harm - may have left feeling humiliated or stressed when disagreements occurred, or answered untruthfully

what is a weakness of asch’s study ? hint ( sample )

• sample consisted of just men from same socio-economic background

• Neto (1995) found women are more conformist, oncenred about relationships and social standing more than men - lacks population validity

• also usa is individualistic culture - cross cultural studies found that collectivist cultures like China had higher conformity rates (Bond and Smith)

• asch didnt account for all groups in society

what is a strength of Asch’s study ?

• standardised procure

• same age , gender , setting

• study can be replicated

• shows consistent results and therefore high reliability