Outline and evaluate research into independent behaviour

by aperlier (student)

A research carried out by Asch in independent behaviour was conducted in order to determine to what extent people resisted the pressure to conform. Asch used a lab experiment to study conformity. Using the line judgment task, Asch put a participant in a room with seven confederates. The confederates had agreed in advance what their responses would be when presented with the line task. The real participant did not know this and was led to believe that the other seven participants were also real participants like themselves. Each person in the room had to state aloud which comparison line (A, B or C) was most like the target line. The answer was always obvious. The real participant sat at the end of the row and gave his or her answer last. In some trials, the seven confederates gave the wrong answer. There were 18 trials in total and the confederates gave the wrong answer on 12 trails. Asch was interested to see if the real participant would conform to the majority view. Asch measured the number of times each participant conformed to the majority view. On average, about one third (32%) of the participants who were placed in this situation went along and conformed with the clearly incorrect majority. Over the 18 trials about 75% of participants conformed at least once and 25% of participant never conformed. This leaves us to wonder why the participants were so ready to conform. In fact, 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 did believe the group's answers were correct. Therefore, people conform for two main reasons: because they want to fit in with the group (normative influence) and because they believe the group is better informed than they are (informational influence).

However, there were some arguments on this study. First of all, all participants were male students who all belonged to the same age group thus creating a bious sample. Furthermore, the task was artificial as it is unlikely to happen in everyday life and lacks ecological validity. Therefore, it is not similar to a real life situation demonstrating conformity. Adding to this, there were participants were not protected from psychological stress – which may occur if they disagreed with the majority, Asch deceived the student volunteers claiming they were taking part in a 'vision' test – the real purpose was to ...

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Another research – carried out by Milgram this time – was set to observe whether people could resist the pressure to obey. Volunteers were recruited for a lab experiment investigating “learning”. Participants were 40 males, aged between 20 and 50, who all had white-collard jobs. At the beginning of the experiment they were introduced to another participant, who was actually Milgram’s confederate. They drew straws to determine their roles – learner or teacher – although this was fixed and the confederate always ended to the learner. There was also an “experimenter” dressed in a white lab coat, played by an actor. The “learner” was strapped to a chair in another room with electrodes. After he has learned a list of word pairs given him to learn, the "teacher" tests him by naming a word and asking the learner to recall its partner/pair from a list of four possible choices. The teacher was told to administer an electric shock every time the learner makes a mistake, increasing the level of shock each time. There were 30 switches on the shock generator marked from 15 volts (slight shock) to 450 (danger – severe shock). The learner gave mainly wrong answers and for each of these the teacher gave him an electric shock. When the teacher refused to administer a shock and turned to the experimenter for guidance, he was given the standard order that “he must go on” and so he did. Results found that 65% of participants continued to the highest level of 450 volts. All the participants continued to 300 volts. The conclusion was that even ordinary people are likely to follow orders given by an authority figure although this might harm an innocent human being. Obedience to authority is ingrained in us all from the way we are brought up.

Some methodological issues were that Milgram’s studies were conducted in laboratory type conditions and leave questions about real-life situations. We obey in a variety of real-life situations that are far more subtle than instructions to give people electric shocks, and it would be interesting to see what factors operate in everyday obedience. The sort of situation Milgram investigated would be more suited to a military context. Also, Milgram's samples were biased: the participants in Milgram's study were all male – lacks ecological validity. Furthermore, in Milgram's study the participants were a self-selecting sample, they might have had a typical "volunteer personality" – not all the newspaper readers responded so perhaps it takes this personality type to do so. There were also ethical issues with his studies. Deception: the participants actually believed they were shocking a real person, and were unaware the learner was a confederate of Milgram's. Protection of participants: participants were exposed to extremely stressful situations that may have the potential to cause psychological harm. However, Milgram did debrief the participants fully after the experiment and also followed up after a period of time to ensure that they came to no harm.