Asch's (1951) conformity study - AO3

Generalisability

A weakness of Asch’s (1951) study is an androcentric and ethnocentric sample of 50 male students, between the ages of 17 and 25, from the school of Swarthmore College in America, which is an individualistic country. This is unrepresentative of social conformity in females or in different collectivist countries, or how age affects social conformity.

Reliability

A strength of Asch's conformity studies is that they are reliable. Every study variation followed the same standardized procedure. All variants involved 5 to 7 confederates, who answered the first two questions correctly and the rest incorrect, and the participants always answered second to last or last in the group. This standardised procedure makes the studies easily repeatable, which supports their reliability.

Applications

Asch’s study is applicable to real life scenarios. On average, participants conformed to incorrect answers in 32% which reflects real- world  scenarios involving normative influence, when people publicly agree but privately disagree with a group's statements, such as fashion trends, copying social media habits or going along with group trends.

Validity

The internal validity was high in this experiment, as it was conducted under controlled lab conditions. Confederates had pre- planned answers and all participants were given the same set of questions - therefore, cause (majority influenced pressure) and effect (conformity levels) can be established.

However, it had low ecological validity. The experiment took place in a controlled laboratory environment, lacking mundane realism, where participants judged line lengths with confederates giving incorrect answers. This task does not replicate real world situations as it is an artificial task.

Ethics

Asch’s study was unethical as participants were deceived, unaware of the true aim, told they were taking a vision test. The lack of proper debriefing meant they were left distressed after making public judgments against the majority, less protection from harm. Although the deception was necessary to prevent demand characteristics, increasing internal validity.