conformity

Question 1

what are the strengths of Asch’s line experiment?

Answer 1

• research support for the effects of task difficulty - maths problems given and participants agreed with wrong answers when problems were harder
• high internal validity - strict control over extraneous variables like timing of assessment and type of task used, furthermore, participants did the experiment first without confederates to see if they knew the correct answer removing the confounding variable of lack of knowledge

Question 2

what are the weaknesses of Asch’s line experiment?

Answer 2

• tasks and situation were artificial, participants knew they were in a study and may have just gone along with it - responding to demand characteristics therefore lacks ecological validity - it was based on people’s perception of lines so findings cannot be generalised to real life as it doesn’t reflect the complexity of real life conformity
• furthermore, group of participants didn’t resemble groups we experience in everyday life
• participants were American men - research shows women conform more and conformity rates are higher in collectivist cultures such as China where social group is more important

Question 3

what are the strengths of explanations of conformity?

Answer 3

• research support for NSI - Asch - interviewed participants and some said they conformed due to being afraid of disapproval but when answers were written down, conformity rates fell as giving answers privately meant there was no normative group pressure
• research support for ISI - Lucas et al - given maths problems, when problems were harder, situation was ambiguous so relied on answers given

Question 4

what are the weaknesses of explanations of conformity?

Answer 4

• NSI doesn’t predict conformity in every case, nAffliators who are greatly concerned with being liked by others were more likely to conform, shows that NSI underlies conformity for some people more than it does for others, individual differences can’t be explained by a general theory