Conformity
(Asch)

conformity - change in a persons behaviour/opinions as a result of real/imagined pressure from a person/group

Procedure:

  • asked student volunteers to take part in 'vision test'
  • All but 1 participants were confederates
  • real purpose of study - see if lone 'genuine' participant would go along with others (compliance to majority)
  • 123 male American students
  • shown 1 card with standard line & another card with 3 lines on it & asked to say which ones matched
  • real participants always last to answer
  • confederates gave wrong answer 12 times out of 18

Findings:

  • on 12 critical trials - 37% of responses made by genuine participants were incorrect (went along with wrong answer)
    • unambiguous task - but very clear what right answer was
  • 25% of participants never conformed
  • 75% conformed at least once
  • 5% conformed everytime
  • to check that task was unambiguous - conducted control trial with no confederates & found that people got answer wrong about 1% of time

Variations in Asch study

  • to find out which variables had significant effects on amount of conformity
  1. Difficulty of task
  • difference between line length was made much smaller (more ambiguous)
  • level of conformity increased
    • suggests informational social influence to get right answer
  • however - when people have high self-efficacy (believe in own abilities) than conformity levels drop
    • e.g. Perrin & Spencer (1980) repeated Asch's original study with engineering students
    • only 1 student conformed in total of 396
  1. Size of majority
  • found very little conformity when majority consisted of just 1 or 2 individuals
  • but - when majority of 3 - proportion of conformity jumps to 31.8%
  • when majority increases to more than 3, levels of conformity do increase substantially more
    • consequently there is a curvilinear relationship
  1. Unanimity of majority
  • in original study - confederates all gave same wrong answer - when genuine participant was given support of either another real participant/confederate - conformity levels dropped to about 5%
  • either when 'dissenter' gave silly answer (different to rest) - led to less conformity by 'real' participant
  • Asch concluded - breaking group's consensus that was major factor in conformity reduction

EVALUATION

!LIMITATION!

Artificial situation & task

  • participants knew they were in research study - may have gone along with whats expected (demand charachteristics)
  • means findings do not generalise to real-world situations
    • especially those where consequences of conformity might be important

!LIMITATION!

Limited Application

  • all participants were American men
  • women may be more conformist
  • US is an individualist culture (more concerned about themselves than social group)
  • similar conformity studies conducted in collectivist cultures have found conformity rates are higher
  • means Asch's findings tell us little about conformity in women and other cultures

!STRENGTH!

Research support

  • support effects of task difficulty
  • Lucas et al (2006) asked participants to solve 'easy' & 'hard' maths problems
  • participants conformed more often when problems were harder
  • shows Asch was correct in claiming that task difficulty is 1 variable that affects conformity

COUNTERPOINT

  • Lucas et al's study found conformity is more complex than Asch suggested
  • Participants with higher confidence in their maths abilities conformed less on hard tasks than these with low confidence
  • shows an individual-level factor can influence conformity by interacting with situational variables
    • Asch didn't research roles of individual factors