Social Influence (Asch's Line Experiment) Flashcards
(13 cards)
Who did Asch’s Line Experiment and in what year??🖇️
Solomon Asch in 1951
Summarise Asch’s Line Experiment!
- One naive ppt in a group of confederates
- Ppts given 4 lines. 3 of which were comparison lines and 1 a stimulus line
- Ppts told to guess which of the 3 was the same length as the one of the left.
- Line lengths were very clearly different
- Confederates told to deliberately answer wrong
- Due to group pressure, naïve ppt would occasionally answer wrong due to conformity
- Each group was given 18 trials, 12 of these were critical trials (meaning the confederates all gave incorrect answers)
What’s the main statistic that came from Asch’s Line Experiment??🔢
75% of ppts answered wrong atleast once
Discuss the generalisability and reliability of Asch’s Line Experiment!
Not generalisable (all ppts white American males in high school)
Nelo (1995) -> Women are more conformist as they’re more concerned about social relationships & perceptions than men
High reliability (Controlled environment so can be replicated)
Describe the Application and Validity of Asch’s Line Experiment!
Low application (task wasn’t representative of real-life situations & group wasn’t representative of who we’d be around irl)
Internal validity (Controlled conditions)
Discuss the Ethics of Asch’s Line Experiment!
Deception (given wrong aim that it was a vision test)
Privacy & Confidentiality
Protection & Harm (subject to embarrassment)
What type of bias is Asch’s Line Experiment subject to??📄
Culture bias -> done with an individualist culture (less likely to conform but collectivist cultures more likely to conform)
What were Asch’s 3 variables??
- Group size
- Unanimity
- Task difficulty
What did Asch do to reduce unanimity (agreed by everyone) to the group as one of his variables??
He added a dissenter which reduced conformity to 5% rather than 31.8%.
When the dissenter gave a different incorrect answer (rather than the correct one), conformity still dropped to 9%
How did group size impact the conformity??
2 confederates made it 13.6% and 3 confederates rose it to 31.8% of conformity to the wrong answer in the critical trials (which is same percentage as with the group size of 6-8 in the og experiment)
This shows that conformity peaks at 3 confederates.
What is the evidence for Asch’s experiment being low application??
Nelo (1995) suggested that women might be more conformist due to possibly being more concerned about social relationships.
What is a strength of Asch’s experiment??
Asch was correct about task difficulty impacting conformity:
Lucas et al (2006): Students were given math problems ranging in difficulty and conformed more to wrong answers when the questions were harder
What is a counterpoint of Lucas et al (2006) supporting Asch’s experiment??
It showed that conformity was related to confidence (high confidence = low conformity)
Shows that individual-level factors interact with situational ones but Asch didn’t investigate individual factors.
