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Conformity - Asch's Experiment - Coggle Diagram
Conformity - Asch's Experiment
Baseline Study - meaning that it is a study that is used to compare to later measurements in order to judge the effectiveness of the treatment of new conditions.
Using a line judgment task, Asch put a naive participant in a room with seven confederates/stooges. The confederates had agreed in advance what their responses would be when presented with the line task. 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.
He tested 3 variables against the baseline study...
Unanimity
Testing to what extent all the members in the group agree - seeing if a unanimous view Vs a non unanimous view affects conformity
By introducing a non-conforming participant who disagreed with the rest of the conformers results showed that the naive participants conformity decreased. In one variation the disenter chose the wrong answer and in the other variation he provided the right answer. In both examples the conformity of the naive PP decreased.
The influence of the decision being unanimous plays a large part - even one person disagreeing can suggest cracks in the majorities unanimous view and makes non-conformity more likely.
Task difficulty
Testing to see if by making the task harder (making the stimulus line and the comparison lines more similar) would affect the degree of conformity
This meant it was harder for the genuine participants to see the difference between the lines. The conformity then increased as a result of the answer being unclear so naturally the naive participants looked to other people for guidance and assumed they were right and that there views are wrong (Informational Social Influence)
Group size
Increasing the group size thus increasing the size of the majority to test wether the size of the group has an affect on conformity.
Conformity increased with group size but only up to a point. With 3 confederates the conformity to the wrong answer rose to 31.8% but when the majority was greater than 3 the conformity levelled off.
Suggesting most people are easily swayed by others as one or two people was enough to sway the opinion.
Assess to what extent people will conform to others in a group even when the answer is ambiguous.
Solomon Asch - 1951
Believed people behave according to how they perceive the world, not how it actually is.
Lab experiment using 50 male participants
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).
