SI - Variables affecting conformity (Asch)

Question 1

Asch’s experiment on conformity and evaluation

Answer 1

• Aim: Ash’s experiment was designed to see if people would conform to a majority’s incorrect answer in an ambiguous task (one where the answer is obvious)
• Each group contained only one real participant, the rest where confederates
• Results: In the control group, where the participant judged the line length in isolation, participants got it wrong 0.7% of the time. In the critical trials, participants conformed to the majority 37% of the time. The control group shows that the task was easy to get right. The participants conformed due to NSI, they knew the group answer was clearly incorrect but conformed to avoid ridicule and/or fit it
  EV:
• All participants were male American undergraduates which makes it difficult to generalise to the general population; Doesn’t take into account gender and cultural differences (individualist culture vs collectivist culture) (Beta bias, culture bias)
  Lab experiment:
• Not natural situation so lacks ecological validity; artificial setting and task so participants may show demand characteristics
• High internal validity: It had strict control of variables meaning extraneous variables effects are minimized, experiment could be easily repeated and had a control group to establish participants knew the answer
• Ethical issues; participants were deceived; participants are not fully informed before experiment takes place so cannot give informed consent

Question 2

What are the situational factors influencing conformity in Asch’s experiment

Answer 2

• Group size: With two confederates, participants conformed 14% of the time. With three confederates, conformity rose to 32%. After this there was little change to conformity rates. Very small majority are easier to resist than larger ones but influence does not keep increasing with the size of the majority
• Social support: Asch did an experiment where one of the confederates was a dissenter, a person who disagrees with the majority, this made it easier for the participant to resist group pressure to conform - the rate of conformity fell to 5.5%
• Task difficulty; When Asch made the task more difficult, making the lines of more similar lengths, conformity levels increased. People are more likely to conform if they are less confident that they are correct. This is due to ISI