COnformity and gender

Introduction

Conformity is when we change our behaviour or our attitude in response to the influence from others. This pressure can either be real or imaginary. Psychologists believe that a person can be influenced by both a influence is when a person changes their attitudes and beliefs to fit in with a larger group. An everyday example of this is liking the same music as your friends do just to be accepted. This is known as compliance.

There have been a number of studies carried out on conformity. One of these is Jenness who asked participants to estimate how many beans they thought were in the jar, and once the whole group of participants had answered Jenness relayed the answers back to the group. He then asked them to guess again how many beans there were in the jar and he found that the participant’s second answers had conformed to the answers of the group. This is a study of majority influence.

Another psychologist who carried out a study on conformity is Sherrif (1936). His study was based on a visual illusion, where a light in a dark room was stationary but appeared to move. He asked the participants to state how fast they thought the moving light was going, and the answers varied differently as it was individual perception. However when the experiment was carried out as a group task, the answers became more around the same, as a group norm had developed.

Both Sherrif and Jenness’ study were ambiguous, which means there is no clear answer.

One of the key studies of conformity was Asch (1951). He disagreed with Sherrif and Jenness, and said it was obvious that people would conform if given a non-ambiguous task. He got participants to take part in a visual test however all but one of these were confederates. The participants were taken to a classroom where they were shown a group of 3 standard lines. They were then shown the.

There were a few issues with Asch’s study, both methodological and ethical. One was that Asch’s ...

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Both Sherrif and Jenness’ study were ambiguous, which means there is no clear answer.

There were a few issues with Asch’s study, both methodological and ethical. One was that Asch’s study lacks external validity as the participants were among strangers. In a real life situation the group of people. Another problem with pressure is the ethics – it could cause them psychological or physical harm.

Asch also did not focus on gender. Eagly and Carli (1981) found that women conformed more than men. This was explained by the idea that women worry more about social relationships than men. In the experimental situation, they have different short term goals so they appear more conformist in the experiment than they appear in the real world.

Formulation of aims

The aim of this study is to replicate Asch’s research, adapting the original design. We overcame the problem of creating pressure by testing participants individually. This will get over the confounding variable of pressure because the participants would not be giving their answers in front of a room of strangers. This will also erase any ethical problems. Asch also didn’t take into account gender, which we did in our experiment. We wanted to see whether males or females conformed more in an unambiguous situation.

Statement of alternative hypothesis

We expect women to conform more in an unambiguous situation when asked to compare a comparison line with the standard line.

Null hypothesis

There will be no significant difference in conformity between men and women when tested in an unambiguous situation.

Method

The method used will be a laboratory experiment, because there is good control in a laboratory experiment, shows a causal link and is easy to replicate. The weaknesses of doing a laboratory experiment are that it can have low ecological validity as the results may not be able to be generalised and that there is also more chance of ethical issues.

The IV will be the lines and the participant’s unambiguous task. The DV will be whether they will conform or not to other results.

The experiment will have independent groups as this reduces the chance of any pressure being put on the participant, as well as eliminating the chance of cheating. I will also be measuring gender.

One confounding variable could be what are we measuring? Conformity or pressure? Another one could be the environment where the experiment takes place. If it was too noisy it could cause distractions, and another one is is it easy to cheat?

Participants

The researchers of this experiment will be 4 A Level Psychology students, and the target population is non-psychology students aged 16-18. We will be using the sampling method opportunity sampling, and we intend to have 20 participants: 10 girls and 10 boys. The participants will be allocated based on their gender.

Materials

The materials used will be:

pen
stopwatch
copies of lines, standardised instructions and results

The experiment will take place in a quiet room with a table and a chair in it, and two separate sides of the common room will be used to keep participants who have done the experiment away from those who have yet to do it, so that cheating and overhearing the debrief is prohibited.

Procedures

The room in which the experiment will take place in will be set up with a set of standardised instructions, results and a sheet of lines on a table with a chair next to it. We will select 10 females and 10 male students from the common room to take place in the experiment. All the students who are pre experiment will be waiting in one half of the common room until it is their turn, with one researcher monitoring them. Another researcher will act as an escorter and will take a student at a time to the experiment room where another researcher will monitor them as they do the task. The researcher in the experiment room will give the participant time to read the standardised instructions and then 30 seconds to complete the task, which the researcher will count down on a stopwatch. After the 30 seconds the researcher will tell the participant to stop and they will then be escorted to another half of the common room where another researcher will debrief them and make them wait there until the whole experiment is complete. This will stop participants from talking to each other and information on what the experiment entails being leaked out. This as a result will stop demand characteristics happening. While the debriefer is debriefing the participant, the escorter will take another participant to the experiment room. This will occur 20 times. After the experiment, all results are collected and the number of participants who conformed is noted, as well as the gender which conformed the most. After a participant has completed the experiment the researcher will note down on the results what gender the participant was.