Research into conformity
Discuss research into conformity (12 marks)
Social influence can have a big affect on how we behave. One psychologist who was interested in the topic of conformity was Asch. In 1951, Asch conducted an experiment to investigate the extent to which social pressure from a majority group could affect a person to conform.
Asch conducted a laboratory experiment that included 50 male students from Swarthmore College in the USA. The participant completed a ‘vision test’ where they were asked to judge the size of a line and compared it to a choice of three other lines. Seven confederates were place in the lab for every one participant. The participant didn’t know the nature of the confederates and viewed them as another set of participants. Each person in the room had to state aloud which comparison line (A, B or C) was most like the target line and the answer was always obvious. The real participant sat at the end of the row and gave his or her answer last. There were 18 trials in total and the confederates gave the wrong answer on 12 trails (called the critical trials). Asch was interested to see if the real participant would conform to the majority view.
Over the 12 critical trials about 75% of participants conformed at least once and 25% of participant never conformed. On average, about one third (32%) of the participants who were placed in this situation went along and conformed to the clearly incorrect majority on the critical trials. When they were interviewed after the experiment, most of them said that they did not really believe their conforming answers, but had gone along with the group for fear of being ridiculed.
One limitation of the study is that is used a biased sample. All the participants were male students who all belonged to the same age group. This means that study lacks population validity and that the results cannot be generalized to females or older groups of people. Another problem is that the experiment used an artificial task to measure
Social influence can have a big affect on how we behave. One psychologist who was interested in the topic of conformity was Asch. In 1951, Asch conducted an experiment to investigate the extent to which social pressure from a majority group could affect a person to conform.
Asch conducted a laboratory experiment that included 50 male students from Swarthmore College in the USA. The participant completed a ‘vision test’ where they were asked to judge the size of a line and compared it to a choice of three other lines. Seven confederates were place in the lab for every one participant. The participant didn’t know the nature of the confederates and viewed them as another set of participants. Each person in the room had to state aloud which comparison line (A, B or C) was most like the target line and the answer was always obvious. The real participant sat at the end of the row and gave his or her answer last. There were 18 trials in total and the confederates gave the wrong answer on 12 trails (called the critical trials). Asch was interested to see if the real participant would conform to the majority view.
Over the 12 critical trials about 75% of participants conformed at least once and 25% of participant never conformed. On average, about one third (32%) of the participants who were placed in this situation went along and conformed to the clearly incorrect majority on the critical trials. When they were interviewed after the experiment, most of them said that they did not really believe their conforming answers, but had gone along with the group for fear of being ridiculed.
One limitation of the study is that is used a biased sample. All the participants were male students who all belonged to the same age group. This means that study lacks population validity and that the results cannot be generalized to females or older groups of people. Another problem is that the experiment used an artificial task to measure