Please enable JavaScript.
Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.
Types of Conformity - Coggle Diagram
Types of Conformity
Asch (1955)
Procedure: 1 real participant in a room of confederates. One card had a 'standard' line while the other had 3 lines of varying length. The confederates would usually give wrong answers when saying which line matched the first card.
Conclusions: Some people will conform to group norms even when the answer is clearly wrong. Shows that conformity is a powerful influence in our behaviour.
Method & Participants: A laboratory environment - a room but controlled. 123 male college students were selected on a voluntary basis from four American universities.
Aims: Asch wanted to find out what would happen when people were with a majority of other people who were obviously wrong in their decision - ambiguous situation.
Findings: When confederates gave correct line, naive participants answered correctly 98% of the time. Participants conformed on 36.8% of critical trials. 24% of participants never conformed. 5% of participants conformed on all trials all of the time. 75% of participants conformed at least once.
M.E.R.V.S
Method: Was a laboratory experiment - controlled conditions means Asch can measure only conformity :check: However, due to it being a laboratory experiment it lacked ecological validity :red_cross:
Ethics: Participants weren't able to give their fully informed consent as it would have been impossible to carry out the study if the participants has known the true nature of the experiment. :red_cross:
Reliability: Other studies with women and in other countries have not supported Asch's original findings. :red_cross:
Validity: It was a controlled experiment so they were measuring only conformity :check:
Not a very real life (meaningful) task. :red_cross:
Sample: Only young American males were used so hard to generalise to other types of people in population. :red_cross:
Types of Conformity
Identification
Some people conform because they identify with the group they want to belong - this is called identification.
-
Internalisation
If people stay in this role or adopt the behaviour and beliefs permanently this is called internalisation.
-
Jenness (1932) :candy:
His experiment used an ambiguous situation involving a glass bottle filled with beans. He asked participants individually to estimate how many beans the bottle contained. He then put them in a room together - Jenness found that all participants changed their original answer when they were provided with another opportunity to estimate the number of beans in the bottle. Average estimate for males before: 790 after: 695 (12% change) females before: 925 after: 878 (5% change)
Conformity is a change in a person's behaviour or opinions as a result of real or imagined pressure from a person or group of people.