The Asch Conformity Experiments Free Essay Example

Solomon Asch in the year 1951 carried out an experiment on group conformity. Conformity is or can be said to be the act of matching attitudes beliefs, and behaviors to group norms, of which norms are implicit, specific rules, shared by a group of individuals, that guide their interactions with others. People often choose to conform to society rather than to pursue personal desires because it is often easier to follow the path others have already made or taken, rather than creating their own.

This tendency to conform occurs in small groups and at times can even be society as a whole, and may result from subtle unconscious influences or direct and overt social pressure of others or when an individual is alone. And so Asch in the quest to find out just how deep-rooted group conformity is and how it affects a person to conform, he carried out an experiment, Asch in 1951 devised what is now regarded as a classic experiment in social psychology.

Asch used a lab experiment to study conformity, where he had 50 male students from Swarthmore College in the USA participate in a vision test. Using a line judgment task, Asch put a naïve participant in the room with seven confederates. The confederates had agreed in advance wat their responses would be when presented with the line task. The participants did not know this and were led to believe that the other seven confederates were also real participants like themselves. Each person in the room had to state out loud which comparison line, a target was set.

The answer was always obvious. The real participants sat at the end of the row and gave his or her answer last. There were 18 trails in total, and the confederate gave the wrong answer on 12 trails called the critical traits. Asch was interested to see if the real participant would conform to the majority view. Asch’s experiment also had a control condition where there were no confederates, only a real participant. 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 on the critical trails. Over the 112 critical trails, about 75% of the participants conformed at least once and 25% of the participants never conformed. In the control group, with no pressure to conform to confederates less than 1%of the participants gave the wrong answer.

Among the limitations of this study is that it can be said to have been biased in that it only had male participants and also these were of the same age group, and so one can argue to say maybe female put in this scenario maybe would have responded differently and also that, maybe if the experiment was carried out on people of different age groups. So this study can be said to lack population and hence the results can’t be generalized as a presentation of the whole population.

Another problem can be said to be that the experiment used an artificial task to measure conformity-judging line lengths Brain, c. (2000), How often are we faced with making a judgment like the one Asch used where the answer is plain to see so this means that the study had low ecological validity and so the results can be generalized to other real situations of conformity

Another factor is that the participants in Asch-type situations are highly emotional was obtained by back eatl. (1963) who found that participants in this situation had greatly increased levels of autonomic arousal. There are also ethical issues participants were not protected from psychological stress which may occur if they disagreed with the majority.

In conclusion, I would say this experiment if it is to would-be done of a spread out line, the population should be more if the results are to be generalized.

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