Variables affecting conformity

Question 1

What were the 3 variables affecting conformity of Asch’s study?

Answer 1

Group size
Unanimity
Task difficulty

Question 2

How did Asch measure the effect of group size and what did he find?

Answer 2

In enteral, the larger the group the higher the conformity rate. This only happened up to a point, the conformity rate plateaus once there are 3 confederates and once the group contained 7 participants the rate peaked.
1 participant - 3.6%
2 participants - 13.6%
7 participants - 37.1% (peak)
This is because it’s much easier to disagree with one person than to disagree with a large group, but conformity does’t rise with groups larger than 7 as it arouses more suspicion.

Question 3

How did Asch measure the effect of unanimity and what did he find?

Answer 3

In the original study, the confederates gave an unanimous wrong answer so Asch looked at the effect of the participant having an ally. Findings- the presence of just one ally caused conformity to drop from an average of 32% to an average of 5.5%
In some cases, the ally gave the correct answer, in others they gave an incorrect answer, but a different one to the one the confederates used. Both led to decreased conformity- it wasn’t important whether the ally agreed with them, just that they disagreed with the group.

Question 4

How did Asch measure the effect of task difficulty and what did he find?

Answer 4

Asch purposely developed his paradigm to contain an unambiguous task. In general, it’s found that the harder tasks lead to increased conformity. By making the tasks harder (making the lines closer in length), conformity rates increased. This could be due to informational social influence, as participants may not know the correct answer or might genuinely doubt their own response.