| Aim of Asch's experiment | To see if the real participants would conform to social influence in a situation where the correct answer is unambiguous |
| Procedure of Asch Experiment | 123 male american undergrad students were asked to compete in a vision test. they had to pick which of the three lines shown were the same. however, in the experiment, all but one of the ppts were confederates. The real ppt was always called second to last and the confederates gave unanimous wrong answers. |
| Findings | 75% of ppts conformed to the majority at least once by choosing the obvious wrong answer. |
| Factors that influence conformity | Group size - 1 confederate 3% conformity, 3 confederates 32% (highest) 15 confederates 29%
Unanimity - if one confederate always gave a different answer from majority or always gave the correct answer. conformity dropped by a lot.
task difficulty - the harder the task, the lower the conformity. |
| DISADVANTAGES of Asch's experiment | - beta bias, research was done on men and generalized to women. ignores the differences between men and women
- child of its time, national conformity rates at that time were very high. experiment repeated in UK with MUCH lower conformity rates.
- low ecological validity, not a realistic situation, cannot be generalised to other real situations. |
| ADVANTAGES of Asch's experiment | - lab experiment so highly controlled, experiment could be replicated easily. influence of extraneous variables were minimised |
