Conformity Flashcards
What percentage of the time did naïve participants conform in Asch’s baseline study?
36.8%
What percentage of participants never conformed?
25%
What percentage of participants conformed at least once?
75%
What does Asch’s baseline study demonstrate?
A high level of conformity even when the situation is unambiguous.
How did Asch vary group size in his study?
He changed the number of confederates from 1 to 15 (total group size of 2 to 16).
What was the conformity rate when there were two confederates?
13.6%
What was the conformity rate when there were three confederates?
31.8%
What happened to conformity when more than three confederates were added?
It leveled off, meaning adding more confederates made little difference.
Why does group size affect conformity?
People are sensitive to others’ opinions; even one confederate can sway judgment.
What change did Asch make to test unanimity?
He introduced a dissenting confederate who either gave the correct answer or a different wrong answer.
How did a dissenting confederate affect conformity?
Conformity dropped to less than a quarter of the original level.
Did it matter whether the dissenter gave the correct or incorrect answer?
No, just the presence of a dissenter reduced conformity.
Why does unanimity affect conformity?
A dissenter provides social support, allowing the naïve participant to behave more independently.
How did Asch increase task difficulty?
He made the stimulus and comparison lines more similar in length, making judgment harder.
What happened to conformity when the task became harder?
Conformity increased.
Why does task difficulty affect conformity?
The situation becomes more ambiguous, so people rely more on others (informational social influence).
What type of social influence is involved in harder tasks?
Informational social influence – assuming others are correct when unsure.
Limitation of aschs research
limitation is that the situation and task were artificial.
Participants knew they were in a research study (demand characteristics). The task was trivial and there was no reason not to conform.
Also, Fiske (2014)
argued ‘Asch’s groups were not very groupy (not like real-life groups).
This means the findings do not generalise to everyday life (especially
those situations where
the consequences of conformity are important).
limitation (2) of Aschs research
Another limitation is that Asch’s findings have little application.
Only American men were tested by Asch.Neto 1995) suggested that women might be more conformist, possibly because they are more concerned about social
Also the US is an individualist culture
and studies in collectivist cultures (e.g. China) have found higher conformity rates (Bond and Smith 1996).
This means Aschs findings tell us little about conformity in women and people from some cultures.
Strength of aschs research
strength is other evidence to support Asch’s findings.
Lucas et al. (2006) asked participants to solve ‘easy’ and ‘hard’ maths problems. Participants were given answers that (falsely) claimed to be from three other students.
The participants conformed more
often (agreed with the wrong answers) when the problems were harder.
This shows Asch was correct that task difficulty is one variable affecting conformity
