Asch's Study Flashcards

• Wanted to see how social pressure from a majority could influence someone’s behaviour
• Tested conformity using ‘visual perception task’

123 male students

• 123 male students believed they were taking part in visual perception task
• Line judgement task - there was three standard lines and one comparison line
• He put real participiants with 6 other confeds. Real was always last or second last
• Each person had to say their answer out loud. Answer was obvious
• Critical trials

• 36.8 % conformed
• 25% never conformed
• 75% conformed at least once
• In control only 1% was incorrect

• Individual judements are affected by majority influnce
• Participants conformed due to NSI and desire to avoid rejection

1. Group Size
2. Task Difficulty
3. Unanimity

• Would non-conforming confed influence real person
• When people less unanimous; confusion
• The real conformed less often in the presence of a non conforming confed
• Influence of majority; everyone unanimous

• Wanted to vary group size to see if larger group = more conformity (Corulinear relationship)
• With 3 confed + real, conformity rose to 31.8%
• After 3, more confed made little difference
• People can be easily influences

• Does making task harder increase conformity
• When lines were very similiar; conformity increased
• Natural to look at other people when unsure

• It’s a lab experiment
• Extraneous and confounding variables are strictly controlled, meaning replication is easy
• Successful replication increases reliablity

• One strength is support for Asch’s research from other studies one effect of task difficulty
• Lucas et al asked participants to solve ‘hard’ and ‘easy’ maths problems
• Participants given answers from 3 other students (not real)
• Participants conformed more often when problems were harder
• Supports Asch

• Asch’s participants were all American men
• Other research say women may be conformist, because their more concerned about social relationships and being accepted
• Also, USA is an individualist culture (people more concerned for themselves).
• Similiar studies done in China (more collectivist cultures found conformity rates higher
• Asch’s findings tell us little about conformity in women and people from other cultures

• Ethical issues
• Deception - participants were tricked into thinking study was about perception not compliance
• Not informed consent
• Psychological harm after participants realised true aims of study

1) High internal validity - High control in laboratory conditons over extraneous variables. Control done.
2) High replicability
3) Participants were debriefed

1) Lack ecological validity- can’t apply to real life as it’s in lab
2) Lack of generalisability - you can’t apply the same to cultures in China, as U.S is more individualist
3) Susan Friske - groups weren’t groupy