Asch's Research

Specification

• Research into conformity including Asch (1951) and his variation studies (1952, 1956).

Asch's Research

Asch (1951) conducted one of the most famous laboratory experiments examining conformity. He wanted to examine the extent to which social pressure from a majority, could affect a person to conform.

Asch’s sample consisted of 50 male students from Swarthmore College in America, who believed they were taking part in a vision test. Asch used a line judgement task, where he placed on real naïve participants in a room with seven confederates (actors), who had agreed their answers in advance. The real participant was deceived and was led to believe that the other seven people were also real participants. The real participant always sat second to last.

In turn, each person had to say out loud which line (A, B or C) was most like the target line in length.

Unlike Jenness’ experiment, the correct answer was always obvious. Each participant completed 18 trials and the confederates gave the same incorrect answer on 12 trials, called critical trials. Asch wanted to see if the real participant would conform to the majority view, even when the answer was clearly incorrect.

Asch measured the number of times each participant conformed to the majority view. On average, the real participants conformed to the incorrect answers on 32% of the critical trials. 74% of the participants conformed on at least one critical trial and 26% of the participants never conformed. Asch also used a control group, in which one real participant completed the same experiment without any confederates. He found that less than 1% of the participants gave an incorrect answer.

Asch interviewed his participants after the experiment to find out why they conformed. Most of the participants said that they knew their answers were incorrect, but they went along with the group in order to fit in, or because they thought they would be ridiculed. This confirms that participants conformed due to normative social influence and the desire to fit in.

Evaluation of Asch

Asch used a biased sample of 50 male students from Swarthmore College in America. Therefore, we cannot generalise the results to other populations, for example female students, and we are unable to conclude if female students would have conformed in a similar way to male students. As a result Asch’s sample lacks population validity and further research is required to determine whether males and females conform differently

Furthermore, it could be argued that Asch’s experiment has low levels of ecological validity. Asch’s test of conformity, a line judgement task, is an artificial task, which does not reflect conformity in everyday life. Consequently, we are unable to generalise the results of Asch to other real life situations, such as why people may start smoking or drinking around friends, and therefore these results are limited in their application to everyday life.

Finally, Asch’s research is ethically questionable. He broke several ethical guidelines, including: deception and protection from harm. Asch deliberately deceived his participants, saying that they were taking part in a vision test and not an experiment on conformity. Although it is seen as unethical to deceive participants, Asch’s experiment required deception in order to achieve valid results. If the participants were aware of the true aim they would have displayed demand characteristics and acted differently. In addition, Asch’s participants were not protected from psychological harm and many of the participants reporting feeling stressed when they disagreed with the majority. However, Asch interviewed all of his participants following the experiment to overcome this issue.

Asch's Variation Studies

Following Asch’s original research, numerous variations of his line judgement task were carried out. These variations include: group size, unanimity and task difficulty.

Group Size

Asch carried out many variations to determine how the size of the majority, affects the rate of conformity. These variations ranged from 1 confederate to 15 confederates, and the level of conformity varied dramatically. When there was one confederate, the real participants conformed on just 3% of the critical trials. When the group size increased to two confederates, the real participants conformed on 12.8% of the critical trials. Interestingly, when there were three confederates, the real participants conformed on 32% of the critical trials, the same percentage as Asch’s original experiment, in which there were seven confederates. This demonstrates that conformity reaches it’s highest level with just three confederates.

Asch continued investigating group size and in one condition he used 15 confederates. In this experiment the rate of conformity slightly dropped, although Asch didn’t report the percentage. It is possible that the rate of conformity dropped because the real participants became suspicious of the experiment and not because the pressure to conform is less, in larger groups.

Unanimity

In Asch’s original experiment, the confederates all gave the same incorrect answer. In one variation of Asch’s experiment, one of the confederates was instructed to give the correct answer throughout. In this variation the rate of conformity dropped to 5%. This demonstrates that if the real participant has support for their belief, then they are likely more likely to resist the pressure to conform. Furthermore, in another variation, one of the confederates gave a different incorrect answer to the majority. In this variation conformity still dropped significantly, by this time to 9%. This shows that if you break the group’s unanimous position, then conformity is reduced, even if the answer provided by the supporter, is still incorrect.

Task Difficulty

In Asch’s original experiment, the correct answer was always obvious. In one his variations he made the task more difficult, by making the difference between the line lengths significantly smaller. In this variation Asch found the rate of conformity increased, although he didn’t report the percentage. This is likely to be the result of informational social influence, as individuals look to another for guidance when completing the task, similar to the results found in Jenness’ experiment.

Past Paper Questions

8 Markers

• Evaluate Asch’s (1951) research into conformity (8) October 2019

• Evaluate research into conformity. (8) October 2017

Extension