Acsh conformity study
- Created by: EmilyRoseCotterell
- Created on: 22-12-17 15:54
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- Asch (1951)
- Hypothesis
- Will someone go along with an answer that is obviously wrong?
- What is more important - being right or fitting in?
- Procedure
- Used 'confederates' (who deliberately lied) to fool naive ppts (who had no idea what was going on)
- Asked student volunteers to take part in a visual discrimination task
- Ppts seated around a table and looked at 3 lines of different lenghts
- They took turns to call out which line they thought was the same length as the 'standard' line
- The real ppt would always answer second to lasy
- Even though the answer was fairly obvious for the majority of time, the confederates had to give the same incorrect answer
- Findings
- Average conformity rate of 33%
- When all confederates gave the correct answer, ppts made almost no errors
- When confederets gave the incorrect answer, ppts conformed 37% of the times
- 70% conformed at least once
- 5% conformed every time
- 25% never conformed
- Sheriff's conclusion - when faced with an ambiguous situation people look to others for guidance
- Afterwards, Asch created a control condition without the distraction of other confederates and he found that ppts make mistakes 1% of the time
- Aim
- Investigate the extent to which social pressure from a majority group could affect a person to conform
- Evaluation
- Unethical
- Deception + confusion
- Psychological stress if they disagreed with the majority
- Conflict in the study when the ppts tried to decide whether to say what they saw or to conform
- Reliable
- Untitled
- Invalid
- Lacks ecological validity
- Biased sample - so lacks population validity
- All ppts were male + similar ages
- Results cannot be generalised to females + older people
- Used an artificial task to measure conformity - results cannot be used to generalise to real life situations
- Unethical
- Hypothesis
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