Variables Affecting Conformity-Asch’s Research-AO1 Flashcards
What did Asch want to do?
Examine how social pressure from a majority could affect someone’s behaviour.
What was the experiment?
A line judgment with real participants and fake ones. There were 18 trials and the fake participants have the wrong answer 12 times.
What is a confederate?
An actor or a fake participant.
How often did the participants conform to the incorrect answers of the critical trials?
36.8%
How many participants conformed on at least one critical trial?
75%
What is a control group?
One real participant completed the same experiment without any confederates.
What did the control group find?
Found that less than 1% of the participants gave an incorrect answer.
What did the interviews find about the conformed participants?
That most knew their answers were incorrect but went along with the group in order to fit on and not be rejected.
What is the conclusion?
Individuals judgements are affected by majority influence. The participants conformed due to normative social influence.
What is group size?
The number of members within a social group.
What is Unanimity?
The degree to which the group members agree with each other.
What is Task Difficulty?
How obvious the correct answer is.
How was group size manipulated within the study?
They changed the number of confederates in the experiment from 0-15.
How was unanimity manipulated within the study?
A confederate who disagreed with the others. Sometimes that confederate would give the correct answer and other times it would be incorrect.
How was task difficulty manipulated within the study?
The visual perception was made harder and the lines were more similar in length.
