Asch 1951

Asch-Aim

His sim was to investigate conformity and how pressure from a majority influenced people to conform

Asch-procedure

-he gathered 123 male American undergraduates in groups of 6(5 confederates, 1 participant )

- they were told to judge line lengths and give an answer , confederates deliberately gave the wrong answer

-real participant always answered last or 2nd to last

-Asch observed how often participant would conform

Asch-Findings

-36.8% of participants conformed

-25% of participants never conformed

-75% of participants conformed at least once

Factors affecting conformity

-group size- conformity increases with group size but only up to a point

-task difficulty- the harder the task the more people conformed

-unanimity of group - the rate of conformity increased when majority of the group was unanimous

Asch-Evaluation

+high internal validity

-lacks ecological validity

-lacks population validity

-deception

-psychological harm

-lacked validity

Extras

• Perrin and Spencer - criticised by stating that the period the experiment was conducted in influenced the results because it was an anti communist period where people were scared to be different . They said it lacks temporal validity as it cannot be generalised across all time periods.