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compliance and asch's line study essay plan
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- Social Influence
- Institution
- AQA
This document includes an essay plan grid for the subtopic compliance and asch's line study in the A level Psychology social influence topic
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AO1 AO3Aims: A weakness of Asch’s line study is that it lacks temporal validity.
- 1951
- Investigating the extent to which social pressure from a majority group could affect a Perrin and Spencer (1980) repeated Asch’s original study with engineering
person to conform. students in the UK and only 1/396 students conformed.
This could be because the 1950s were a more conformist time in the USA and
since Asch’s study, society has changed and people are less conformist now.
This suggests that the Asch effect isn’t consistent across time.
Procedure: - 123 American male undergraduates. A weakness of Asch’s line study is that there may have been demand
- Each naive participant was tested individually with a group of 6-8 confederates. characteristics.
- Showed participants 2 large white cards at a time. On one card was a ‘standard line’ (X) The participants knew they were in a study so they may have been going along
and on the other card were 3 'comparison lines’ (A,B,C). with the demands of the situation.
- One of these 3 lines was the same length as the standard line and the other 2 lines were The task was trivial so there was no reason to conform because the
clearly wrong. The participant was asked which of the 3 lines matched X. consequences of conformity weren’t severe.
- In the first trials/rounds the confederates all gave the right answer. According to Fiske (2014), Asch’s groups weren’t very groupy so it didn’t
- Each participant took part in 18 trials and on the 12 ‘critical trials’ the confederates gave resemble groups that we are part of in everyday life.
the wrong answer.
- All of the confederates were instructed to give the same wrong answer. This suggests that the findings don;t generalise to real life situations.
Findings: A weakness of Asch’s line study is its limited sample size.
- The naive participant gave a wrong answer 36.8% of the time.
- 75% of participants conformed at least once. The participants were all men and other research suggests that women might
- The asch effect is used to describe this result - the extent to which participants conform be more conformist than men.
even when the situation is unambiguous. They were also all American, which is an individualist culture, where people are
- When participants were interviewed after, most said they conformed to avoid rejection more concerned with themselves than their social group. Studies in collectivist
(NSI). cultures where social groups are more important than the individual have found
higher conformity rates.
This suggests that conformity levels are higher than Asch found since he didn’t
account for gender and cultural differences.
Conclusion: A strength of Asch’s research is support from other studies for the effects of
- participants were publicly changing their answers but privately could tell the right task difficulty.
answer - they were complying.
For example, Lucas et al (2006) asked their participants to solve ‘easy’ and
‘hard’ maths problems. participants conformed more often when the problems
were harder.
This shows Asch was correct in claiming that task difficulty is one variable that
affects conformity.
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