Outline some criticisms of majority influence research and consider whether these are fair

        Solomon Asch researched another study of conformity in 1951 and 1956. Asch believed that the participants in Sheriffs study were influenced because the task was ambiguous and believed that social influence would be practically excluded if the tasks were unambiguous and basically simple. Asch asked participants to look at two cards. One card had one line on it and the other had three. He asked them to match the line on its own with a line out of the three. But the participant didn’t know that all the other participants were confederates giving the wrong answer purposely to influence the participant. Asch’s findings did not match his hypothesis as most people conformed.

        Asch was criticised for only using male college students as his participants and that the sample did not represent the population so his study was biased. Also it did not generalise to other groups such as women and other cultures thus, his study was also culture bias. It has also been criticised for the lack of ecological validity, as the participant’s behaviour would be different in the outside world. Moreover, the study lacked Mundane Realism, as the experiment was not liable to occur in real life, if it did the experiment would have to be far more ambiguous. Asch’s study is said to have shown experimental realism as participants were showing signs of stress, tension, and uneasiness. This briefly states that they would also act like this in a real situation.  

        Asch’s study was also judged for being considerably unethical as participants were deceived and made to feel very uncomfortable. But Asch didn’t anticipate that people would feel uncomfortable as he thought people wouldn’t conform. When the apposing confederates gave their answer participants were concerned about looking foolish. Asch’s study is also said to be a child of its time as there has been other psychologists who have researched conformity following Aschs study and have found very different results. For example Perrin and Spencer in 1981 found only 1 conforming response in 396 trials. Twenty-four years on from that study we cannot say that a bunch of male college students from the 1950’s can represent a whole population forty-eight years later.

        In conclusion I think that the majority of criticisms made about conformity research are not very fair. To get a fair result psychologists cannot always tell their participants the truth about the experiment because there behaviour will not be natural for example the big brother show on television is to show how people act when put in certain situations but if they know that they are being watched then their behaviour will be different to what it is in real life because they want to be liked.

        It is hard for psychologists to mimic real life situations without deceiving participants about the real reason for the experiment, as demand characteristics will make participants act differently. Moreover, a laboratory isn’t exactly a realistic situation. But if they were told the truth then we would not see their natural behaviour and the experiment would not be fair.