Research into Majority Influence

Zimbardo’s experiment was a little different to the others, it involved prisoners and guards. He got 21 students and assigned them a role as a prisoner or guard. During the experiment he found that the students in the roles began acting like their assigned roles. Guards began punishing prisoners and controlling their behaviour. The prisoners began to rebel and barricaded cell doors, some even tried to plan an escape attempt. After six days the experiment was ended due to extreme signs of stress from the prisoners. Zimbardo found that even though the subjects had no-one to conform to uniform and living conditions affected how they acted and behaved.

Asch’s line study is considered by many a child of its time. Although it showed how conformity in small groups existed it was slated as an insignificant task and that this made people conform in order to stop them looking stupid by giving the wrong answer to such an easy task. This being said this conformity shows how strong the tendency is to conform for such a simple task. This evidence shows how a majority of people can affect a singular person or small group even if they personally believe different to the majority. Asch’s findings lead to more in detail research about conformity and development of his ideas to further analyse conformity and how others are influenced by a majority or a unanimous decision. Asch’s study showed Informational influence which is the desire to be right, participants looked towards the behaviour of others in order to act how they believed was correct. Asch’s experiment was a perfect example of this which was what he was aiming to find from the experiment. To make sure the stimulus was ambiguous Asch conducted a control trial in which confederates never gave wrong answers; he found participants were wrong 1% of the time. This is an example of how Asch’s experiment had very low ecological validity because the task would not happen in real life but would have very high control because of the circumstances of the experiment.

Crutchfields experiment can also be likened to Asch’s in that it was a similar task type but conducted in a different way. Crutchfield believed the reason the line experiment showed such high conformity because of face to face environment making people fear ridicule. A good thing about Crutchfields experiment was the fact he made each participants answers private by putting them into a booth on their own. This meant each person wouldn’t need to fear being ridiculed as they were not being shown or told each other’s answers. Although this is true participants were being tested and as a result would not want to look stupid in front of an experimenter by giving the wrong answers to an insignificant task. Crutchfield gave each participant what they believed to be the other participant’s answers. Although this could be seen as deceiving them it was a simple way of seeing if they conformed, as the questions got harder they also became more ambiguous meaning the participants conformed more to the given answers. Deception was a key part in the study as participants believed they were conforming to each other rather than given answers meaning they were unaware of how they were being assessed.

Zimbardo’s study was very different to the others as there was no deception or examples given to show participants how to behave. Guards were told they could make their own rules and punish prisoners as they saw fit, because of this guards began treating prisoners like prisoners of war have been seen to be treated. The task had very high ecological validity because it was a real setting and circumstance that would happen in real life meaning low control as guards were free to behave as they saw fit. All of the participants were post graduate male American students; this is a bad thing about the experiment as you can’t generalise and say this is how everyone would behave, students have a different ideology to adults. As the people involved were all also American it only shows how an American would conform to what they have seen on TV or heard about rather than a global effect. If females had been involved the experiment may have been different because of differences in a gender. Zimbardo’s study also showed how uniforms affect us or behaviour towards a person such as what happened to the prisoners, feeling stressed and depressed because of their living conditions, humiliation they received and treatment within the prison.