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11 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
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Aim of Asch's study. (1955)
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Study the extent to which social pressures shape our behaviour and opinions. In particular, aimed to study impact of group pressure and whether people conform to majority.
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Historical contect of Asch's study. (1955)
WW2 |
Following events of WW2 and in a time where it was felt there was an 'unprecendented technical extension of communication'
Asch felt it was important to understand extent to which people can be deliberately manipulated through group pressure. |
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Academic context of Asch's study. (1955)
Jenness |
Jenness investigated whether people would change their estimates of how many beans were in a jar to conform to a group estimate. However, the answer is ambiguous because it isn't clear exactly how many beans are in the jar.
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Procedure of Asch's study. (1955)
Participants Trials Modifications |
123 naive male pps collected from 3 American colleges. 1 pp was put with a group of 7-9 confederates. Asked to match 1 line from a group of 3. 1 line was correct and the other 2 varied by ¾ inch to 1¾ inches. Confederates answered incorrectly in 12/18 trials.
Modifications to see if the size of the majority or its unanimity had the most impact. Modifications included varying the group size from 1-15, allowing 1 confederate to always answer correctly and telling 1 confederate to always answer incorrectly but a different incorrect answer to the other confederates. Then pps were interviewed. |
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Findings of Asch's study. (1955)
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In normal circumstances pps matched the wrong line 1% of the trials. Under group pressure pps conformed 36.8% of the time. 25% of pps never conformed, but some pps conformed 100% of the time.
1 person giving an incorrect response = answered correctly. Group of confederates raised to 2, pps gave the incorrect answer 13.6% of the time. In the bigger groups there was little variation in how much pps conformed. Asch found that when the pp had a confederate who answered truthfully they only responded incorrectly 25% of the time. |
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Findings of Asch's study. (1955)
Continued = what did pps say about conforming in the interviews? |
In the interviews Asch found that pps stated that they conformed because they did not want to “spoil your results” or because they believed their answers were wrong. Those that did not conform said it was because they had “confidence in their own judgement”.
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Conclusion of Asch's study. (1955)
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Asch concluded that social pressure makes some people conform to the majority. That some people seem to be able to resist this social pressure and remain independent and that if the majority is not unanimous, then conformity declines.
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Evaluation of methodology of Asch's study. (1955)
Strengths |
Laboratory experiments = conducted in controlled conditions, extranious variables kept to a minimum. Study is reliable. E,g. seating arrangement if naive participants meant we can confidently say incorrect answers due to conformity.
Large sample size = 123 people = results are reliable. |
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Evaluation of methodology of Asch's study. (1955)
Weaknesses |
Ethical issues = The naïve participants gave consent to take part in a cognitive psychology experiment on perception, not a social psychology experiment on conformity. Therefore their consent was not informed and they were deceived as to the purpose of the experiment and the role of the other participants in the room.
Low in validity = experiment does not reflect how we act in real life within groups. We are rarely in situations where our decisions are influenced by a group of strangers. This means that we cant generalise the results. |
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Critically assess Asch's study. (1955)
Supporting evidence. Boen et al (2006) |
Boen et al (2006) studied 27 judges who were divided into panels of up to 5 to judge 30 skipping videos. In one condition judges knew each-overs scores, in another they didn't. They found that the scores were more similar when each-overs scores were known. Suggesting they conformed.
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Critically assess Asch's study. (1955)
Evidence against. Bond & Smith (1996) Perrin and Spencer (1980) |
Bond & Smith (1996) conducted a meta-analysis of 133 conformity studies using an Asch-type line judgement task from 17 countries. They found that collectivist cultures (e.g. Asia) tended to show higher levels of conformity than individualist (e.g. USA) cultures. This suggests that Asch’s results are limited.
Perrin & Spencer (1980) carried out an exact replica of Asch's experiment using engineering, mathematics and chemistry students from British Universities. Found that in only 1/396 trials did a naïve participant conform. This suggests that Asch’s findings can be questioned. |
