Outline and Evaluate research into conformity (12)
Asch carried out an experiment in 1951 to investigate the extent to which social pressure from a majority group could affect a person to conform. Asch used a lab experiment, where 50 male students from a college in the USA participated in a ‘vision test’. Using a line judgement test, one of the more naïve participants was put in a room with 7 confederates. The confederates had agreed in advance what their responses would be involving the line task. The real participant didn’t know this, and was led to believe that the other 7 people were participants just like themselves. Each person in the room had to say clearly which comparison line was most alike the target line. The answer was made obvious. The real participant sat at the back of the room and gave their answer last. There were roughly 18 trials in total and the confederates gave the wrong answer on 12 trials. Asch was interested to see if the real participant would conform to the majority view, the experiment also had a controlled condition where there were no confederates. It was found that 32% of the participants who were placed in this situation conformed to the earlier incorrect responses. Over the 12 trials about 75% of participant’s conformed at least once and 25% never conformed. In the control group, with no pressure to conform, less than 1% of participants gave the wrong answer. It was therefore concluded that people either conform due to the fact that they want to fit in or because they believe that the group is better informed than they are. This study is criticised in that it is a biased sample as the participants were all male, all belonged to the same college and were all the same age. With this in mind and the fact that the sample size was small suggests that the data collected isn’t representative of the target population, as it cannot be generalised to female groups for example. Another issue is that the experiment is artificial meaning that it lacks or has very low ecological validity and