Asch's Study of Conformity (AQA GCSE Psychology)

What is conformity?

• Conformity is the act of agreeing with the group (usually the majority)

  • An individual falls in line with the group’s behaviour and/or thoughts, opinions, feelings, beliefs etc.

• People may go along with and appear to agree with the majority even when they disagree with the group’s ideas/opinions/behaviours (a type of conformity known as compliance)

• Conformity occurs when people wish to be accepted by the majority of the group or when they feel that the group are better informed than they themselves are e.g. ‘I’ll just see what everyone else does and then I’ll follow them’

• Conformity may occur due to social or dispositional factors (or a combination of the two) which is covered here

• Conformity is not the same as obedience as conformity involves going along with the group and being guided by them rather than carrying out the instructions/orders of an individual authority figure 

• Examples of conformity might be

  • Joining in with bullying due to your fear that the group might make you their next victim

  • Laughing along to a joke you don’t find funny

  • Following the group at lunchtime as you’re not sure where the canteen is

Conformity Diagram

Safety in numbers…conforming to the group can give us a sense of security and belonging.

Asch’s research into majority influence

• Asch (1955) set up a study to test conformity to the majority which remains one of the most cited and well-known social psychology studies ever 

• Asch was interested in seeing the extent to which group pressure could influence an individual to go against what their eyes were telling them

  • Would the pressure of being in a group, who all agreed as to the wrong answer, force someone to also give an (obvious) wrong answer to a simple question?

• Asch’s study is outlined below:

  • 123 male students from the USA made up the sample of naive participants

  • Each participant sat at a table with 6-8 other male students who were confederates of Asch’s

  • The group was shown a series of cards with lines shown on them:

    • Their task was to say which of the three lines on the right of the card was the same length as the line shown on the left of the card 

Asch's study diagram

Asch's study involved participants studying lines on a card

• Each participant (including the confederates) was asked in turn to say which of the three lines on the right was the same length as the line on the far left of the slide

  • Is line A, B or C the same length as line X?

• There were 18 trials per group.

  • The confederates gave the right answer on the first few trials e.g. in the above example the correct answer is ‘line B’

• There were 12 critical trials within the total of 18 trials

  • On each critical trial the confederates all gave the same wrong answer to the question of line length e.g. in the above example a wrong answer would be ‘line A’

• The results showed that participants gave the wrong answer on 36.8% of the critical trials; 75% of participants conformed at least once

• Asch concluded that people will conform to the majority even when the situation is unambiguous

  • It was clear what the correct answer was per trial yet (some) participants still gave the wrong answer

• Asch also concluded that conformity to the majority is not inevitable

  • 25% of participants did not conform on any of the trials i.e. they showed resistance to social influence in the form of group pressure

Evaluation of Asch’s study of conformity

Strengths

• Asch used a replicable procedure which means that the study could be repeated many times over to check for reliability

• The study has good application e.g. it could be used to inform anti-bullying strategies in schools (e.g. understanding why non-aggressive children become part of a bully’s ‘gang’)

Weaknesses

• Asch’s study may lack temporal validity as it was conducted in a time of higher conformity generally

• The study task was low status and low jeopardy i.e. it didn’t matter if a participant conformed or not, as this was an artificial situation

  • This lowers the validity of the findings