Asch (1958)

What were the aims for Asch (1958)?

To investigate whether individuals would conform to a majority group, even when the correct answer was obvious.

He wanted to see if people would go along with the group due to normative social influence or if they'd remain independent in their judgements

What was the procedure of Asch (1958)?

- showed participants two large white cards at the same time, one was a standard line and one had comparison lines

- one line was the same length as the standard, other two were substantially different

- pps were 123 american male undergraduates, w/ each naive pp was placed in a group of 6 or 8 confederates

- on the first few trials, confederates gave the right answers and then all started to provide the same wrong answer

What were the findings of Asch (1958)?

- naive pp have a wrong answer 36.8% of the time

- 25% of pps didn't conform on any trials

- 75% conformed at least once

What is the Asch effect?

The extent to which participants conform even when the situation is unambiguous.

What were the three variations in Asch's study?

Group size, unanimity and difficulty of task

How did Asch vary group size?

- w/ three confederates, conformity to the wrong answer was 31.8%, and addition of further confederates made little difference

- conformity increases, and then plateaus after 3 confederates

How did unanimity affect conformity in Asch's study?

- presence of another non-conforming person would affect unanimity

- conformity was reduced by a quarter as it allowed the naive pp to behave more independently

- conformity dropped to 5%

How did the difficulty of the task affect conformity in Asch's study?

- he made the standard lines and comparison lines similar length

- conformity increased in this condition

- informational social influence may play a role when a task is ambiguous

How does Perrin and Spencer (1980) invalidate Asch's research?

- replicated Asch's study in the UK with engineering students

- only 1 of the 396 pps conformed

- shows that the original study lacks temporal validity as the conformity displayed was not consistent 20 years later

- this may have been due to shift in social norms

How does Asch only using male students reduce validity?

- used only a small subsection of the pop.

- used all male students from an individualist culture

- not ideal as there are gender differences in conformity, and cultural differences with collectivist cultures being more conformist

- this affects generalisability and limits applicability

How does Asch's research lack ecological validity?

- task would've been novel to pps as they would rarely be asked to compare lines in real life

- therefore their behaviour would've been less authentic than if there task was more mundane such as Schultz's where pps were measured on changing behaviour

- this reduces the application of the research and means the behaviour observed may have been affected by the unusualness of the task set

How does Deutsche and Gerradd (1955) support Asch's research?

- asked pps to write down the answer to the task and then throw the paper away

- conformity dropped to 5% in this variation, which had a similar target pop to Asch and was carried out at a similar time

- shows that Asch's pps were conforming due to the desire to be liked rather than the desire to be right

Not studied (12)

You haven't studied these terms yet.