PAPER 1 - Social Influence - Asch and conformity Flashcards
(15 cards)
Define conformity.
A change in a person’s behaviour or opinion as a result of real or imagined pressure from a person or group of people - Aronson 2011
Describe Asch’s 1951 baseline aim and procedure.
Aim: to assess the extent to which people will conform to others opinions, no matter the un-ambiguity of the situation.
Procedure:
123 Americans tested, each one seated either last or second last in a group of 6-8 made up of other apparent participants (confederates)
Each participant saw 2 cards on each trial…the line X on one card is the standard line and lines A B and C on the other card are the comparison lines.
One of the comparison lines are clearly the same length at X, with the other two substantially different/clearly wrong.
On each trial the participants must say aloud which of the comparison lines were the same length as the standard line X.
The confederates all gave scripted wrong answers.
Describe Asch’s baseline findings.
On average, the genuine participants agreed with confederates’ incorrect answers 36.8$ of the time (conformed one third of the time)
There were individual differences, 25% of the participants never gave a wrong answer/i.e. never conformed.
What are the 3 variables Asch investigated by extending the baseline procedure?
Group size
Unanimity
Task difficulty
How was the variable “group size” investigated?
Asch varied the number of confederates from one to 15 (so the total of the group size was 2-16)
What did Asch find about the relationship between group size and conformity?
A curvilinear relationship…conformity increased with group size, but only up to a point. With 3 confederates, conformity to the wrong answer rose to 31.8%, but the presence of more confederates made little differences - conformity rates soon levelled off.
This suggests that most people are very sensitive to the views of others because just 1 or 2 confederates was enough to sway opinion.
Define unanimity.
The extent to which all members of a group agree.
How was the variable “unanimity” investigated?
Would the presence of a non-conforming person affect the naïve participant’s conformity?
He introduced a confederate who disagreed with the other confederates.
In one variation the confederate gave another incorrect answer, and in the other variation the confederate gave the correct answer.
What did Asch find about the relationship between unanimity and conformity?
The genuine participant conformed less often in the presence of a dissenter and the rate decreased to less than a 1/4 of hat it was when the majority was unanimous.
The presence of a dissenter appeared to free the naïve participant to behave more independently. This was true whether or not the dissenter agreed with the genuine participant.
This suggests that the influence of the majority depends to a large extent on it being unanimous and that non-conformity is more likely when cracks are perceived in the majority’s unanimous view.
How was the variable “task difficulty” investigated?
Asch increased the difficulty of the line-judgeing task by making the stimulus line and the comparison lines more similar to each other in length = harder for genuine participants to see the differences in the lines.
What did Asch find about the relationship between task difficulty and conformity?
Conformity increased! It may be that the situation is more ambiguous when the task becomes harder as it is unclear to the participants what the right answer is.
In these circumstances, it is natural to look to other people for guidance and to assume that they are right and you are wrong…informational social influence (ISI).
Evaluate the limitation that the situation and task in Asch’s research were artficial.
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).
Evaluate the limitation 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 relationships (and being accepted).
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 mans Asch’s findings tell us little about conformity in women and people from some cultures.
Evaluate the strength that Asch’s findings have research support.
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 that conformed more often (agreed with the wrong answers) when the problems were harder.
This shows Asch was correct that task difficult is one variable affecting conformity.
COUNTERPOINT - conformity is more complex than Asch thought. Lucas et al.’s study showed that conformity was related to confidence (high confidence = less conformity).
This shows that individual-level factors interact with situational ones. But Asch did not investigate individual factors.
Evaluate how Asch’s research raises ethical issues.
Asch’s research increased our knowledge of why people conform, which may help avoid mindless destructive conformity.
But when participants are deceived they cannot give their informed consent to take part and may have a negative experience.
Therefore, we might still argue that the research was justified because there are a wide range of potential applications and the stress cause was minimal.
