Factors Affecting Conformity: Situiational Factors

Question 1

Group unaminity

Answer 1

Conformity rate have been found to decline when majority influence is not unanimous. An application of this is when Asch introduced a dissenter he found that when at least one other person didn’t conform, conformity rates dropped.

Question 2

Age

Answer 2

People are more likely to conform if they’re the same ages as the people they are conforming to.

Question 3

Size of the group

Answer 3

Conformity rates increase as size of the group increases. This is connected to Asch who found that just a pair means low conformity rates.
However, conformity doesn’t keep rising with the size of the group it peaks at about 3 or 4. Asch found that real group size for conformity was 3 and so Mori and Arai choose 4 for their group.

Question 4

Task difficulty

Answer 4

The more difficult the task the more people look to others for guidance. An application of this is that Asch made the task more difficult by making the line difference smaller, because of this the participant would be less certain of the right or wrong answer.