Majority Influence

This demonstrates informational social influence as participants probably felt that other participants had better knowledge than them or were more informed of the situation and were therefore more likely to have estimated the right distance.

2. Normative Social Influence (NSI) – when we want to be liked and accepted as a member of a particular group (want to ‘fit in’) to gain their approval.  Two studies demonstrate normative social influence and these are a study by Asch in 1951 and a later study by Crutchfield in 1955.

Asch aimed to find out whether a group of American male student participants would yield to the majority and give a wrong answer even when the correct answer was obvious.  This could be criticised as all the participants were male and they were also all students, who tend to be cleverer than an everyday person, this makes the results hard to generalise.  Furthermore, the study was carried out in the 50s when America was a communist country and individualism was not an accepted behaviour.

Asch gave the participants a simple task to match one line with another.  This experiment was good as the task was relatively easy and the answer was obvious, unlike the ambiguousness of Sherif’s previous study, but, it did however lack ecological validity as it presented participants with an artificial situation which has little relevance to everyday life.  The participants were tested in groups of 7, in which only one person was a real participant, the rest were all stooges hired by the experimenter.  There were 18 trials in total and the stooges were asked to give the same wrong answers in 12 trials.  They were seated so that the naïve participant always gave their answer second from last.

Asch found that the basic conformity rate was 32%, 74% of the participants conformed at least once and 5% conformed on every single trial.  He came to the conclusion that participants conformed even when they knew that the answer they gave was wrong, they wanted to fit in with the group (NSI).

Another study carried out by Crutchfield in 1954 improved on Asch’s study.  He wanted to find out if people would still conform if not in a face to face situation.  He tested more than 600 participants which is a large sample and makes generalisations easier.  Each participant sat in their own booth and could not see into anyone else’s; they were given a stimulus in which they had to answer.  They were told that the lights on the display panel indicated other people’s answers and always believed they were the last to answer; however, each participant was shown an identical display by the experimenter.

Crutchfield found that the rate of conformity depended on the task, the harder the task, the greater the conformity.  This can be criticised as once again the participants were asked to complete a task irrelevant to everyday life, therefore the study lacked mundane realism.

Perrin and Spencer repeated Asch’s line study, instead this time they carried it out in the UK.  However, they also used university students, particularly engineering students, who are trained not to conform.