What is the Asch social conformity theory?
Asch's experiments demonstrated how individuals are influenced by the majority opinion of a group, even when it conflicts with their own judgment. This highlights the significance of social pressure on individual decision-making and the factors that lead to conformity within a group.
The experiments revealed the degree to which a person's own opinions are influenced by those of a group. Asch found that people were willing to ignore reality and give an incorrect answer in order to conform to the rest of the group.
Conducted by social psychologist Solomon Asch of Swarthmore College, the Asch conformity experiments were a series of studies published in the 1950s that demonstrated the power of conformity in groups. They are also known as the Asch paradigm.
In Asch's Conformity Experiment, the principle of conformity is examined by placing a subject in a group of confederates who are instructed to give incorrect answers to a series of simple perceptual tasks. The subject is asked to state which line in a group of three lines is the same length as a reference line.
A strength of Asch's study into conformity is that it was carried out in a lab setting and was carefully controlled. This means that there was good control over extraneous variables, therefore any change in results was due to the change in the independent variable and its effect on the dependent variable.
Asch (1951) conducted one of the most famous laboratory experiments examining conformity. He wanted to examine the extent to which social pressure from a majority, could affect a person to conform.
Asch concluded that there are two main causes for conformity: people want to be liked by the group or they believe the group is better informed than they are. He found his study results disturbing. To him, they revealed that intelligent, well-educated people would, with very little coaxing, go along with an untruth.
In psychology, the Asch conformity experiments or the Asch paradigm were a series of studies directed by Solomon Asch studying if and how individuals yielded to or defied a majority group and the effect of such influences on beliefs and opinions.
The Asch line length study showed that people can be influenced by an interest to assimilate. They may change their beliefs and behaviors in order to fit in with a group.
- Group size.
- Unanimity.
- Task difficulty (as investigated by Asch)
What are the two types of conformity according to Asch?
There are two types of conformity present in Asch's study: normative conformity which is when someone conforms in order to be liked and accepted and informative conformity which is when someone conforms because they believe others know more than they do, thus they must be right.
A desire to be accepted, to not make waves, or to punish “non-conformists” has motivated bullying, exclusion, and even large-scale atrocities. The Holocaust is often cited as an example of the dangers of unchecked conformity and blind obedience to authority.
Several factors are associated with increased conformity, including larger group size, unanimity, high group cohesion, and perceived higher status of the group. Other factors associated with conformity are culture, gender, age, and importance of stimuli.
All the participants were male students who all belonged to the same age group. This means that the study lacks population validity and that the results cannot be generalized to females or older groups of people.
Weaknesses of Asch's conformity study:
Asch's line study was conducted in a laboratory setting which lacks ecological validity. This means the environment was artificial and unnatural which may have caused them to behave in a way that may not generalise to natural settings.
Asch (1955) found that 76% of participants conformed to group pressure at least once by indicating the incorrect line. Conformity is the change in a person's behavior to go along with the group, even if he does not agree with the group.
Asch's experiment suggested that when participants thought everyone else saw things differently than they did, they conformed to others' judgments rather than their own.
Asch identified task difficulty as a variable that affects conformity. He found that when he made the line judgement task more difficult, conformity levels increased, as the participant was more likely to believe that the confederates were right.
Expert-Verified Answer
The age of the group is not typically a primary factor that influences conformity.
Asch's finding was hugely influential, but a key criticism has been his use of confederates who pretended to believe unanimously that a line was a different length than it really was. They might well have behaved in a stilted, unnatural manner.
What are the two main reasons for conformity?
There are two other main reasons for conformity: informational influence and normative influence.
Conformity Examples
People tend to conform to various rules even though some may not seem relevant or make sense. For instance, people pay fines after violating rules and regulations. Another is driving on the left side of the road, which people follow even though they may not understand the relevance.
The aim of the experiment was still to see if people would conform towards the group norm. The results showed that the individuals conformed to the group norm, even if the answers were wrong.
(p. 292) The difference between the Asch effect and groupthink is that victims of groupthink are strangers to each other while Asch's subjects are a friendly and tight-knit group.
Final answer: The major flaw in the Asch conformity study was the neglect of crucial factors influencing conformity—the size of the group and whether the response was public or private. Participants were more likely to conform when their responses were public and when they weren't the sole dissenter in a group.
