Conformity: Asch's research Flashcards
(20 cards)
How many participants were included in the study of Asch’s baseline study and what were their demographic?
123 US male undergraduates
What were the tasks ppts had to complete?
- Ppts asked to look at 3 different line lengths
- Took turns to see which line out the 3 looks the same as the ‘standard line’
- Took turns to call out
When did the naïve ppt call out answer?
second to last
How many confederates were included in each group?
6-8
On how many of the trials did the confederate always give the wrong answer?
12 out 18
What were the 12 trials called?
Critical trials
What was the rate of conformity on the critical trials?
33%
How many never conformed on the critical trials? (Baseline study)
1/4
How many conformed to six or more of the critical trials? (Baseline study)
1/2
How many conformed on all 12 critical trials? (Baseline study)
1 in 20
In the control condition (w/o confederates) what was the percentage of incorrect answers?
1%
What did the ppts say after Asch interviewed them?
majority who conformed trusted their own perception but changed their public behaviour to avoid disapproval
What were the 3 variations?
- Group size
- Unanimity
- Task difficulty
How did group size affect conformity?
- 3% conformity with 1 confederate
- 13% with 2 confederates
- 33% with 3 confederate and not increasing if group size increased
How does unanimity affect conformity?
If confederate just before the ppt disagrees with majority and gives the correct answer, the conformity drops to 5.5%
How does task difficulty affect conformity?
- Increased difficulty = more conformity
A03 - LIMITATION - unrepresented sample
- Study uses 123 American male US undergraduates
- America = western country
- Does not include other gender, culture and uses students (educated)
- Therefore, we may question whether these findings can be generalised to the wider population
A03 - LIMITATION - temporal validity
- One problem is that it may not reflect conformity today
- in 1956, the US was in the grip of McCarthyism, a strong anti-Communist period where people were afraid of going against majority and so were more likely to conform
- Perrin and Spencer attempted to recreate Asch’s study in the UK
- Initial study they found only one conforming response out of a total of 396 trials where a majority unanimously gave the wrong answer
- Society has changed since the 50’s so people are possibly less conformative today.
- Calls into question the temporal validity of Asch’s findings
A03 - LIMITATION- Artificial nature of tasks
- Problems with artificial nature
- For example, there were no real consequences of ppts if they did conform to wrong answer
- Therefore, conformity to the trivial trial will likely have be greater
- In real life, there are often real consequences for certain conformity behaviour : e.g. smoking underage when all your friends are smoking.
- This will ultimately affect whether or not you would conform to certain behaviours.
- Fiske argues that Asch’s group was not very ‘groupy’ and did not resemble groups that were apart of everyday life e.g. friendship groups
- Therefore it is difficult for Asch’s findings to be generalised to everyday situations and thus lack external validity.
A03 - LIMITATION - Group size
- Issues determining group size
- Asch had concluded that majority of size 3 was a sufficient number to maximal influence and therefore most subsequent studies using Asch’s procedure have used 3 as the majority size
- Bond points out that no studies other than Asch have used a majority greater than 9, and in other studies of conformity the range of majority sizes used is much narrower, typically between 4 and 2.
- This, suggests Bond, means that we know very little about the effect of larger majority on conformity levels
