Conformity: Asch's Research

Procedure- showed participants twolarge white cards. On one card was a 'standard line' and on the other card there were three 'comparison lines'. One of the three lines was the same length as the standard line. 

The participants were 123 male American undergraduates. Each naïve participant was tested individually in a group with six to eight confederates. 

Confederates gave rcorrect answers on first few trials but then started making errors. Confederates were instructed to all give the same wrong answer. 

Each participant took part in 18 trials and there were 12 'critical trials' where the confederates gave the wrong answer

Findings- naïve participant gave wrong answer 36.8% of the time

25% did not conform which means that 75% conformed at least once 

When participants were interviewed afterwards they said that they conformed to avoid rejection (normative social influence)

Group size- he found that with three confederates, conformity to the wrong answer rose to 31.8%. But the addition of further confederates made little difference

This suggests that there is no need for a majority of more than three

Unanimity- he introduced a dissenting confederate (a confederate who disagreed with the others) and found that conformity was reduced by a quarter of a level 

This suggests that the influence of the majority depends to some extent on the group being anonymous 

Task difficulty- he made the task more difficult by making the stimulus line and the comparison lines more similar in length. Conformity increased under these conditions

This suggests that informational social influence occurs when a situation is more ambiguous

A child of its time- Perrin and Spencer repeated Asch's study with engineering students in the UK. Only one student conformed in 396 trials. This may be due to the fact that engineering students would have felt more confident about measuring lines. However, it may also be because it was an extremely conformist time in the America in the 1950s.Therefore this is a limitation as it suggests that the Asch effect is not consistent across situations and time

Artificial situation and task-  demand characteristics may have occured. Also, the groups didn't really resemble groups that were part of everyday life; Fiske said that 'Asch's groups were not very groupy'.Therefore this is a limitation because it means that the findings can not be generalised to everyday situations

Limited application of findings- Neto suggested that women might be more conformist because they are more concerned about social relationships. Also, the study was conducted in an individualist culture (United States), whereas similar conformity studies conducted in collectivisrt cultures (e.g. China) found that conformity rates were higher. Therefore this is a limitation because his findings may only apply to American men as he did not take into gender and cultural differences into account