Asch's Experiment

Asch 1956

An experiment to investigate the extent in which social pressure from a majority group can influence people to conform.

Procedure:

50 male students participated in a “vision test”, using a line judgment task. Asch put a naïve participant in a room with 7 confederates and asked for the participants to look at three lines and call out the one that looked the same length as the example. The confederates would purposely give the wrong answer on occasions to see if the real participant would conform with the others.

Ethics:

·      Participants weren’t protected from psychological stress f they disagreed

·      Participants in the situation had greatly increased levels or autonomic arousal

·      Participants suffered from inner conflict to agree or disagree with the majority

·      Asch deceived participants into the real purpose of the…