Asch AO1 gap fill

Procedures – Method: lab experiment, Design: repeated measures, Participants: groups of seven or eight male students; only one ‘real’ participant in each group; others were confederates of the experimenter, Task: shown a stimulus line (S) and then three other lines (A, B and C), asked to say out loud which line matched the stimulus line. The real participant answered either last or last but one.

Number of trials in total: 18  , Number of critical trials: 12 , What happened in critical trials: confederates had all been primed to give the same wrong answer.

Findings - Percentage of incorrect answers in control trials: 0.7%.

Percentage of incorrect answers in the critical trials: 37%

Percentage of participants who conformed at least once: 75%

Percentage of participants who conformed on every critical trial: 5%

Conclusions -  Normative social influence had taken place — the naïve participants agreed with the opinion of the group because they wished to avoid being rejected by them. Some participants reported that they weren’t aware they had given incorrect responses, suggesting that informational social influence had also taken place