Discuss research into conformity - notes on Jenness, Asch , Perrin and Spencer.

by chloe_huggins (student)

AS and A Level Psychology

Discuss research into conformity (12 marks)

Conformity is yielding to group pressures.
There are two types of conformity such as compliance and internalization.
Compliance is when you conform to the group but privately maintain your own view.
Internalization is when you conform to the group but privately change your views to match those of the group.

There have been many experiments in psychology investigating conformity and group pressure such as jenness.

Jenness was the first to study conformity.
His experiment was an ambiguous situation involving glass beans.
He asked participants individually to estimate how many beans were in the bottle and then put the group in the room with the bottle and asked them to provide a group estimate.
Participants were then asked to estimate the number again on their own to see if their original estimate had changed on the influence of the majority.
Almost all changed their individual guesses to be closer to their group estimate.

Methodological

lacks ecological validity as it can’t be generalized to real life.
It is easy to replicate however so it’s a reliable study.

Ethical issues

deception
informed consent.

Asch

Devised a perceptual line judgement task which is also known as the Asch Paradigm where participants had to indicate which three of the comparison lines matched the standard line.
There was 123 male students which were placed in groups of 7-9 and were seated around a large table.
All but one of the students were confederates.
The ...

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Methodological

lacks ecological validity as it can’t be generalized to real life.
It is easy to replicate however so it’s a reliable study.

Ethical issues

deception
informed consent.

Asch

Devised a perceptual line judgement task which is also known as the Asch Paradigm where participants had to indicate which three of the comparison lines matched the standard line.
There was 123 male students which were placed in groups of 7-9 and were seated around a large table.
All but one of the students were confederates.
The naïve participants was seated second to the end of the row.
Confederates gave unanimous wrong answers on 12 of the 18 trials.
Overall, the conformity rate was 37%.
On average participants conformed in 1/3 of trials and 5% of participants conformed on every trial and 25% of participants gave correct answer on every trial.

Ash asked participants why they conformed.

Some felt their perceptions were wrong and doubted their eyes,
others said they thought the rest of the group were wrong but conformed because they didn’t want to stand out.
Some participants became increasingly anxious and self conscious regarding their answers and some were stressed.

Strong group pressure to conform operates especially if the group is a unanimous one.

Methodological

Participants were male college students so was a limited sample and you cant generalize to other populations
Results may have been affected by time and place of study as in the 1950’s people in the usa were pressured to conform.

Perrin and Spencer carried out the Asch paradigm in the UK using male undergraduate engineering students and they found only one incident of conformity in every 400 trials.

Asch’s paradigm was a lab experiment so had

high control
easy to replicate
can prove cause and effect
lacks ecological validity.

Ethical

Participants were deceived about the true aim of study.
Some experienced discomfort and anxiety and may have felt foolish at the debriefing which breaks ethical guidelines for protection of participants.