What was Asch interested in?
Asch was interested to see if the real participant would conform to the majority view. Asch's experiment also had a control condition where there were no confederates, only a "real participant.".
What did Solomon Asch do in his experiment?
Solomon Asch conducted an experiment to investigate the extent to which social pressure from a majority group could affect a person to conform.
How did Asch use the line judgment test?
Using a line judgment task, Asch put a naive participant in a room with seven confederates/stooges. The confederates had agreed in advance what their responses would be when presented with the line task.
What did Asch think of the high levels of conformity found by Asch?
Some critics thought the high levels of conformity found by Asch were a reflection of American, 1950's culture and told us more about the historical and cultural climate of the USA in the 1950s than then they do about the phenomena of conformity.
What was the main problem with Sherif's (1935) conformity experiment?
He believed that the main problem with Sherif's (1935) conformity experiment was that there was no correct answer to the ambiguous autokinetic experiment. How could we be sure that a person conformed when there was no correct answer?
What does Asch mean by low ecological validity?
This means that the study has low ecological validity and the results cannot be generalized to other real-life situations of conformity. Asch replied that he wanted to investigate a situation where the participants could be in no doubt what the correct answer was. In so doing he could explore the true limits of social influence.
When did Asch change the procedure?
In further trials, Asch (1952, 1956 ) changed the procedure (i.e., independent variables) to investigate which situational factors influenced the level of conformity (dependent variable).
What are the results of Asch's experiment?
The results of Asch's experiment resonate with what we know to be true about the nature of social forces and norms in our lives. The behavior and expectations of others shape how we think and act on a daily basis because what we observe among others teaches us what is normal, and expected of us. The results of the study also raise interesting questions and concerns about how knowledge is constructed and disseminated, and how we can address social problems that stem from conformity, among others.
What was Asch's goal?
Asch's goal was to see if the real participant would be pressured to answer incorrectly in the instances when the Confederates did so, or whether their belief in their own perception and correctness would outweigh the social pressure provided by the responses of the other group members.
Who conducted the Asch conformity experiment?
The Asch Conformity Experiments, conducted by psychologist Solomon Asch in the 1950s, demonstrated the power of conformity in groups and showed that even simple objective facts cannot withstand the distorting pressure of group influence.
What did Solomon Asch demonstrate about social pressure?
The Asch Conformity Experiments, conducted by psychologist Solomon Asch in the 1950s, demonstrated the power of conformity in groups and showed that even simple objective facts cannot withstand the distorting pressure of group influence.
What is the Asch line study?
The Asch Line Study – A Conformity Experiment. In his famous “Line Experiment”, Asch showed his subjects a picture of a vertical line followed by three lines of different lengths, one of which was obviously the same length as the first one. He then asked subjects to identify which line was the same length as the first line.
Who was Asch?
Solomon E. Asch was a pioneer in social psychology. He was born in Poland in 1907 and moved to the United States in 1920. Asch received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1932 and went on to perform some famous psychological experiments about conformity in the 1950s.
How many students did Asch use?
Please try again later. Asch used 123 male college students as his subjects, and told them that his experiment was simply a ‘vision test’. For his control group, Asch just had his subjects go through his 18 questions on their own. However, for his experimental group, he had his subjects answer each of the same 18 questions in a group ...
What age group was the Asch line study?
One big issue with the Asch line study is that the subjects were all white male college students between the ages of 17 and 25, with a mean age of 20. Since the experiment only shows results for this small and specific group of people, it alone cannot be applied to other groups such as women or older men.
What did Asch find about control groups?
As for his control group, Asch found that people generally said the correct answer when they did not have a group of actors saying answers before them.
What is the Asch line experiment?
Finally, it’s good to remember that the ‘Asch Line Experiment’ is just that: an experiment where people looked at lines. This can be hard to apply to other situations, because humans in group settings are rarely faced with questions that have one such obvious and clear answer, as was the case in this experiment.
What is unanimous actor group?
Having a unanimous actor group, except for one actor who sticks to the correct response no matter what the group or subject says. Having one actor decide to change their answer from the group’s answer to the subject’s answer.
Who Was Solomon Asch in Psychology?
Solomon Asch studied social conformity and the power of influence that groups have on individuals. Asch was a social psychologist and is credited for the Asch Conformity Experiments, also known as the Asch Paradigm.
Asch's Line Experiment
Asch's line experiment involved subjects and confederates. A confederate is somebody who is secretly working with the researcher. A small group including a subject and several confederates were shown two cards. The first card had a single line on it, called the reference line.
What is Social Conformity?
Social conformity is the power of persuasion that comes from a person aligning their attitudes, beliefs, values, and behaviors with their perceptions of other people's attitudes, beliefs, values, and behaviors.
Experimental Procedure
- Experimental Procedure
Asch used a lab experimentto study conformity, whereby 50 male students from Swarthmore College in the USA participated in a ‘vision test.’ Using a line judgment task, Asch put a naive participant in a room with seven confederates/stooges. The confederates had agreed in advanc…
Findings
- Findings
Over the 12 critical trials, about 75% of participants conformed at least once, and 25% of participants never conformed. In the control group, with no pressure to conform to confederates, less than 1% of participants gave the wrong answer.
Conclusion
- Conclusion
Why did the participants conform so readily? When they were interviewed after the experiment, most of them said that they did not really believe their conforming answers, but had gone along with the group for fear of being ridiculed or thought "peculiar. A few of them said that they really …
Critical Evaluation
- Critical Evaluation
One limitation of the study is that is used a biased sample. 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. Another problem is t…
Asch Conformity Video Clip
- Asch Conformity Video Clip
The clip below is not from the original experiment in 1951, but an acted version for television from the 1970s.
Factors Affecting Conformity
- Factors Affecting Conformity
In further trials, Asch (1952, 1956) changed the procedure (i.e., independent variables) to investigate which situational factors influenced the level of conformity(dependent variable). His results and conclusions are given below:
How Did The Asch Line Study Work?
Who Was Solomon Asch?
Findings of Asch’s Conformity Study
- The results of Asch's experiment resonate with what we know to be true about the nature of social forces and norms in our lives. The behavior and expectations of others shape how we think and act on a daily basis because what we observe among others teaches us what is normal, and expected of us. The results of the study also raise interesting quest...
Interviewing The Participants
Conclusions from The Asch Line Study
- Solomon E. Asch was a pioneer in social psychology. He was born in Poland in 1907 and moved to the United States in 1920. Asch received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1932 and went on to perform some famous psychological experiments about conformity in the 1950s. One of these studies is known as the “Asch Line Experiment”, where he found evidence supporting the i…
Asch Line Study vs. Milgram Experiment
- Asch found that his subjects indeed were more likely to give a false response after the other members of their group (the actors) gave false responses. As shown in this ‘Table 1’ from his experiment, during 18 trials, the ‘Majority Error’ column shows no error when the group response was the correct response, such as in Trial #1. However, when the entire group intentionally gave …
Further Experiments and Variations
- After the experiment, Asch revealed the true experiment to his subjects and interviewed them. Some subjects had become very agitated during the experiment, wondering why they kept disagreeing with the group. When the group pressed one particular subject on why he thought that he was correct and the entire group was wrong, he replied defiantly, exclaiming: “You’re probably…
Why Is The Asch Line Study Ethnocentric? and Other Criticisms
- Asch found that his subjects often changed their answers when they heard the rest of the group unanimously giving a different response. After the interviews, Asch concluded in his study that his subjects conformed to the opinions of the group for three different reasons: Distortion of perception due to the stress of group pressure: This group of subjects always agreed with the gr…
References
- Both the Asch Line Study and the Milgram Experiment look at conformity, obedience, and the negative effects of going along with the majority opinion. Those negative effects are slightly awkward, like in the Asch Line Study, or dangerous, like in the Milgram Experiment. Both experiments were conducted in the Post-WWII world as a response to the conformity that was re…