Week 4 - Key Studies

We need to know about two key studies into conformity - Asch's (1951) line experiment which has become a classic experiment into conformity as well as Mori & Arai (2010) who replicated Asch's line experiment with a few tweaks.

For each experiment we need to know the main aims, method/procedure and the results

Why Though?

When faced with a situation where there's a clear right and wrong, we like to think that we'd always pick the right answer, regardless of what the majority group is doing. However, in practice, that doesn't seem to be the case. Not putting your hand up in class because nobody else does is an innocent example but what about more sinister scenarios? Think about German soldiers in the second world war and in particular the atrocities of concentration camps - were these people genuinely 'evil' or can good people be persuaded to do evil acts via something so simple as conformity?

Asch (1951) - Effects of group pressure upon the modification and distortion of judgments.

Resources

This video contains actual footage of the original experiment in the 1950s...

This video is more explanatory, talking through the steps of the experiment

Study summary on simply psychology

Simply Psychology Summary

Generally, most publications of research in psychology (as well as other fields) start with something called an 'abstract'. The abstract is intended to give readers a quick summary of the study, including key findings, without requiring them to read the full text. Reading the abstract is always a good place to start when looking at a new piece of research

AIM

Solomon Asch (1951) conducted an experiment to investigate the extent to which social pressure from a majority group could affect a person to conform

METHODS

Asch used a lab experiment to study conformity, whereby 50 male students from Swarthmore College in the USA participated in a ‘vision test.’ Using a line judgment task, Asch put a naïve participant in a room with seven confederates.

The confederates had agreed in advance what their responses would be when presented with the line task. The real participant did not know this and was led to believe that the other seven participants were also real participants like themselves.

Each person in the room had to state aloud which comparison line (A, B or C) was most like the target line. The answer was always obvious. The real participant sat at the end of the row and gave his or her answer last.

There were 18 trials in total, and the confederates gave the wrong answer on 12 trails (called the critical trials). Asch was interested to see if the real participant would conform to the majority view. Asch's experiment also had a control condition where there were no confederates, only a "real participant."

Asch measured the number of times each participant conformed to the majority view. On average, about one third (32%) of the participants who were placed in this situation went along and conformed with the clearly incorrect majority on the critical trials.

Over the 12 critical trials, about 75% of participants conformed at least once, and 25% of participant never conformed. In the control group, with no pressure to conform to confederates, less than 1% of participants gave the wrong answer.

RESULTS

CONCLUSION & KEY POINTS

Why did the participants conform so readily? When they were interviewed after the experiment, most of them said that they did not really believe their conforming answers, but had gone along with the group for fear of being ridiculed or thought "peculiar." A few of them said that they really did believe the group's answers were correct.

Apparently, people conform for two main reasons: because they want to fit in with the group (normative influence) and because they believe the group is better informed than they are (informational influence).

Mori, K., and Arai, M. (2010). No need to fake it: Reproduction of the Asch experiment without confederates.

"Asch’s finding was hugely influential, but a key criticism has been his use of confederates who pretended to believe unanimously that a line was a different length than it really was. They might well have behaved in a stilted, unnatural manner. And attempts to replicate the study could be confounded by the fact that some confederates will be more convincing than others. To solve these problems Kazuo Mori and Miho Arai adapted the MORI technique (Manipulation of Overlapping Rivalrous Images by polarising filters), used previously in eyewitness research. By donning filter glasses similar to those used for watching 3-D movies, participants can view the same display and yet see different things."

This excerpt comes from a British Psychological Society article, I'd recommend reading the full thing because it gives a really good overview of the background to Mori & Arai (2010) as well as their aim, methodology and results (basically everything we need to know)

Mori & Arai (2010) - BPS

Aim

The aim of Mori & Arai (2010) was to To confirm the result of Asch (1951) - that majority influence would increase conformity - without the effect of acting and deception (no confederates)

Participants

The participant group was made up of 104 undergraduate Japanese students, 40 were men and 64 were women. This helped to address the gender bias in Asch's original experiment

Method & Procedure

Laboratory experiment with two independent variables of gender and majority influence

The dependant variable measured was the frequency of conforming errors made on 12 critical trails where one of the group could see different lines

Participants were tested in groups of 4. One of the group would be given a different type of glasses than the other 3 meaning when presented with the line length task they would see a different correct answer to the others.

The participants were shown lines of different lengths and asked to state aloud which line they believed matched the stimulus line. The participant who would see the different length line would always be in position 3 when responding.

Results & Conclusions

TLDR: Conformity was only found within female groupings whereas male groups showed little to no conformity to the majority view - different to Asch's findings.

"Whereas Asch used male participants only, the new study involved both men and women. For women only, the new findings closely matched the seminal research, with the minority participant being swayed by the majority on an average of 4.41 times out of 12 key trials (compared with 3.44 times in the original). However, the male participants in the new study were not swayed by the majority view.

There are many possible reasons why men in the new study were not swayed by the majority as they were in Asch’s studies, including cultural differences (the current study was conducted in Japan) and generational changes.

Things to think about

Participants in Asch's original experiment cited uncertainty as a factor contributing to their conformity - what do you think happens to conformity as a task becomes more difficult?
The results of Mori & Arai (2010) failed to confirm Asch's findings for MALE participants. Why do you think this is?
Mori & Arai (2010) found female participants were more likely to conform than males. What does this suggest about gender and conformity?

ACTIVITY

Learning Objectives:

Understand the main aim, methods/procedure and results for Asch's (1951) line experiment
Understand the main aim, methods/procedure and results for Mori & Arai (2010) replication of Asch (1951)
Acknowledge and explain the differences and similarities in findings

On Google Classroom, complete 'Asch 1951' and 'Mori & Arai 2010)

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