Conformity

Who investigated conformity?

Asch

Variable affecting conformity

Group size, unanimity, task difficulty

Conformity

A change in a person’s behaviour/opinions as a result of real or imagined pressure (from 1 or more people)

Link group size with Asch

Asch increased the size of the group by adding more confederates, increasing the size of the majority

Link group size with conformity

Conformity increases with group size, but only up to a point- levelling off when the majority was greater than 3

Unanimity

The extent to which all the members of a group agree

In Asch’s studies, when was the majority unanimous? what did it produce?

When all the confederates selected the same comparison line - it produced the greatest degree of conformity in the naive participants

Link task difficulty with Asch

Asch’s line judging task is more difficult when it becomes harder to work out the correct answer

Link conformity and task difficulty

Conformity increased because participants assume that the majority is more likely to be right

Describe Asch’s procedure

123 American men were tested

They were each put in a group with other apparent participants and saw 2 large white cards - there was 1 standard line named X on one card and on another card there were 3 lines A B & C which were comparison lines

One by one the participants had to say (out loud) which of the comparison lines was the same length as the standard line X

Describe physical arrangement of participants in study

Participants were tested in groups of 6 to 8 - only one was a genuine participant

The genuine participant was always seated last or second to last in the group
Others were all confederates of Asch

What did Asch’s confederates do?

All gave the same (incorrect) scripted answers each time, and the genuine participant did not know the others were ‘fake’ participants

Findings of Asch’s experiment (1951 - baseline study)

Genuine participants agreed with confederates’ incorrect answers 36.8% of the time - they conformed about 1/3 of the time

Some individual differences; 25% of participants never gave a wrong answer - they never conformed

Variables investigated by Asch to extend his baseline study

Group size, unanimity, task difficulty

Link group size and Asch

Asch varied the number of confederates from 1-15, so the total group size was from 2-16

Link group size and confomity

Conformity increased with group size, but only up to a point. With 3 confederates, conformity to the wrong answer rose to 31.8%. But the presence of more confederates made little difference and the conformity rate soon levelled off

What do the findings from linking group size & conformity suggest?

Most people are very sensitive to the views of others, because just 1 or 2 confederates was enough to sway opinion

Link unanimity and Asch

He wondered if the presence of a non-conforming person would affect the participant’s conformity. He introduced a confederate who disagreed with the other confederates. The genuine participant conformed less often in the presence of a nonconformist.

Rate decreased to less than ¼ of the level it was when the majority was unanimous. The presence of a dissenter appeared to free the participant to behave more independently, even if their answer was different to the groups’ & participants’

Link unanimity and conformity

The influence of the majority depends to a large extent on it being unanimous. Non-conformity is more likely when cracks are perceived in the majority’s unanimous view

Link task difficulty and Asch

Asch wanted to know if making the task harder would affect the degree of conformity. He increased the difficulty of the line-judging task by making the standard line and the comparison lines more similar to each other in length, making it harder for the genuine participants to see the differences between the lines

Link conformity and task difficulty

Asch found that conformity increased. The situation is more unclear when the task becomes harder and so the participants aren’t sure what the right answer is - so in these circumstances it is natural to look to other people for guidance and assume that they’re right and you’re wrong, aka ISI (informational social influence)

How is ‘artificial situation and task’ a limitiation of Asch’s investigation

The task was artificial and the participants knew they were in a research study, so may simply have gone along with what was expected (demand characteristics).

Task of identifying lines was relatively trivial and so there was no reason not to conform.

According to Susan Fiske (2014), Asch’s groups were not very groupy and didn’t resemble groups we experience in everyday life.

It means that the findings do not generalise to real-world situations, especially those where the consequences of conformity might be important

How is ‘limited application’ a limitation in Asch’s investigation

The participants were American men. Women may be more conformist (possibly because they are concerned about social relationships and being accepted - Neto 1995)

The US is an individualist culture - i.e. where people are more concerned about themselves rather than their social group. Similar conformity studies conducted in collectivist cultures (such as China where the social group is more important than the individual) have found that conformity rates are higher (Bond & Smith 1996)

This all emans that Asch’s findings tell us little about conformity in women and people from some cultures

How is research support a strength of Asch’s research

There is support from other studies for the effects of task difficulty.

→Todd Lucas et al. (2006) asked their participants to solve ‘easy’ and ‘hard’ maths problems. Participants were given answers from 3 other students - not actually real. The participants conformed more often - i.e. agreed with the wrong answers - when the problems were harder.

This shows Asch was correct in claiming that task difficulty is one variable that affects conformity

What is a counterpoint for the research support strength form Lucas

Lucas’s study found that conformity is more complex than Asch suggested. Participants with high confidence in their maths abilities conformed less on hard tasks than those with low confidence, which shows that an individual-level factor can influence conformity by interacting with situational variables (e.g. task difficulty). But Asch did not research the roles of individual factors

What is an ethical issue of Asch’s research?

The participants were deceived as they thought they other people involved in the procedure (the confederates) were also genuine participants like themselves