Research into conformity (Asch 1951-1956)

Aim

To investigate the extent to which social pressure from a majority group could affect a person to conform

Procedure

• 123 American students told they were doing a study of ‘visual perception’ (deception)

• placed around a table of confederates (only 1 confederate)

• had to state if line A,B or C matched X

• 12 of 18 trials were ‘critical’ where confederates gave the same incorrect answers

• participants was 2nd to last saw his peers give the wrong answers

Results

• 12 critical trials, 32% conformity rate to wrong answers

• 75% conformed on at least one trial

• 25% remained completely independent

Conclusion

Majority does have an effect on the minority

desire to be right persuades people to copy others

Generalisability -

• The generalisability of the Asch study could be considered low due to the lacking temporal validity

• The high levels of conformity found may be because of the time that the experiment was done as Asch’s study took place in 1950s America when the ‘red scare’ was happening. This may make people more likely to conform as they did not want to stand out and be seen as communist

• Modern day replications have found that people are far less conforming in tasks such as the line test. This means the study lacks temporal validity as people in today’s society may show lower levels of conformity

• This suggests that Asch’s research into conformity cannot be generalised universally in today’s society.

Reliability +

• However, the Asch study has high reliability because the conformity study involved clear standardised procedures

• For example, all participants sat around a table with several confederates, all participants gave their answer last and all participants heard confederates give the wrong answer on 12 of 18 trials

• This is beneficial because standardised procedures allow for a high level of consistency, making the study’s methodology easy to replicate

• This means that Asch’s procedure adheres to the scientific demand of replicability and therefore other researchers can see if they can replicate findings using the same methodology to find the same results

Application +

• Asch’s research has led to practical Application to real life

• Due to the findings of the line conformity test, jurors are now warned about conformity during their briefing so that they do not feel excessive pressure by other jury members to give a specific verdict

• Although group influence is a necessity within jury decisions, jury members must still show individual accountability

• This implies that Asch’s results have been used successfully in everyday life (e.g the criminal justice system) to help improve the running of society

External validity -

• On the other hand, Asch’s lab experiment on conformity of line trials can be said to have a low external validity

• This means that because the study took place in lab (an artificial environment) we must be careful when generalising the results to the real world

• Primarily the task was too artificial, so it does not reflect real-life situations of conformity (e.g following social media trends)

• This implies that Asch’s results cannot be fully generalised to each real life situation of conformity, as his results were based on an artificial situation of conformity, which misses out the complexities of real life conformity

Internal Validity +

• Additionally, Asch’s study also has high internal Validity

• The studies were lab experiments with 18 line trials therefore it had a high degree of internal validity allowing Asch to establish cause and effects relationships

• That is to see whether other people’s answers caused participants to change their answers

• This implies that the study was accurately measuring conformity, and the study has higher explanatory power because it measured what it set out to measure

Variables Affecting conformity

1. The difficulty of the task

2. Size of the majority

3. Unanimity

The difficulty of the task

• made the differences in lines smaller to make it more difficult, when difference was larger it was easier

• Harder task= conformity increases as they’re more unsure and looking to others for help

  Easier task= conformity decrease

• Support (Abrams 1990)- It found that conformity was highest when the confederates were in the participant's in-group (other psychology students) and responses were public, compared to when the confederates were an out-group (history students) or responses were private.

Size of the majority

• 1 confederate= 3% conformity, 3 confederates= 32% conformity, in the original (5-7 people) it had a 37% conformity, suggesting a limit to the conformity to majority

• Very small group= decreases conformity

  Large scale group= increased conformity

• Contradicting study (Bond 2005)- suggests a limitation of research in conformity is that studies have used only a limited range of majority sizes

Unanimity

• extend to which majority agree ( all confederates say the same wrong answer vs saying different wrong answers)

• Unanimous verdict= Increase in conformity

  Disturbed unanimity= decreased conformity

• Contradicting study (Moscovici 1969)- All female participants had 36 different blue slides with minority saying it was green in 8% of trials