SOCIAL INFLUENCE ESSAY PACKS
,Outline and evaluate Asch’s research into conformity.
AO1:
Asch’s baseline procedure:
- Investigated the effects of group size, unanimity and task difficulty as variables that
would lead to increase or decrease in conformity
- Group size: to test this, number of confederates would vary from 2 to 16
- Conformity was found to increase with group size but levelled off at 31.8% with
presence of more confs
- Unamity: Asch introduced a conf who gave a correct answer in one variation and a
wrong answer in another one
- Genuine pps were found to conform less in the presence of a dissenter, freeing
the pps to act more independently
- Task difficulty: increasing the difficulty of the line judging task made conformity increase
as it became natural for them to look to others for guidance and assume they are right
and you are wrong.
AO3:
Situation is very artificial:
- Pps knew they were in a research study and may have just gone along with what was
expected of them
- The task was also relatively trivial and not necessarily what was expected of pps irl
- Susan Fiske (2014): the groups were not what we would experience in everyday life
- This means the findings can not be generalised to real world situations
Limited scope of application:
- All the pps were American men
- Other research suggests women may be more conformist
- The USA is also more of an individualist culture
- Similar studies done in collectivist cultures like China found that conformity rates
are much higher
- This means Asch’s findings tell us little about conformity in women and other cultures, so
cannot be applied everywhere
It has support from other studies:
- Todd Lucas et al (2006): found that pps conformed more in a task about solving maths
problems when the problems were harder
- This shows Asch was correct in claiming that task difficulty is a variable affecting
conformity
, Counterpoint: A didn’t research individual factors:
- Pps that had higher confidence in maths abilities conformed less on hard tasks
compared to those with less confidence
- This shows individual level factors can influence conformity, something Asch didn’t
research
,Outline and evaluate Asch’s research into conformity.
AO1:
Asch’s baseline procedure:
- Investigated the effects of group size, unanimity and task difficulty as variables that
would lead to increase or decrease in conformity
- Group size: to test this, number of confederates would vary from 2 to 16
- Conformity was found to increase with group size but levelled off at 31.8% with
presence of more confs
- Unamity: Asch introduced a conf who gave a correct answer in one variation and a
wrong answer in another one
- Genuine pps were found to conform less in the presence of a dissenter, freeing
the pps to act more independently
- Task difficulty: increasing the difficulty of the line judging task made conformity increase
as it became natural for them to look to others for guidance and assume they are right
and you are wrong.
AO3:
Situation is very artificial:
- Pps knew they were in a research study and may have just gone along with what was
expected of them
- The task was also relatively trivial and not necessarily what was expected of pps irl
- Susan Fiske (2014): the groups were not what we would experience in everyday life
- This means the findings can not be generalised to real world situations
Limited scope of application:
- All the pps were American men
- Other research suggests women may be more conformist
- The USA is also more of an individualist culture
- Similar studies done in collectivist cultures like China found that conformity rates
are much higher
- This means Asch’s findings tell us little about conformity in women and other cultures, so
cannot be applied everywhere
It has support from other studies:
- Todd Lucas et al (2006): found that pps conformed more in a task about solving maths
problems when the problems were harder
- This shows Asch was correct in claiming that task difficulty is a variable affecting
conformity
, Counterpoint: A didn’t research individual factors:
- Pps that had higher confidence in maths abilities conformed less on hard tasks
compared to those with less confidence
- This shows individual level factors can influence conformity, something Asch didn’t
research
