Conformity

Both dispositional and social factors affect conformity.

Which of the following is the best definition of ‘dispositional factors’?

Shade one box.

Read the following description of a study.

Write a suitable null hypothesis for the described study of conformity.

Give one conclusion the psychologist could draw from the described study of conformity.

Use the results to explain your answer.

Asch used a very similar procedure to the one described.

Briefly evaluate Asch’s study of conformity.

Read the following conversation.

Describe Asch’s study of conformity and evaluate the research method used in his study.

Refer to the conversation as part of your answer.

Solomon Asch carried out his famous ‘line’ experiment in the 1950s.

Discuss whether or not Asch’s study of conformity would be considered to be ethical now.

Use your knowledge of the British Psychological Society guidelines on ethical issues in psychological research to inform your discussion.

A psychologist did a study to find out more about conformity.

She put participants into different sized groups.

She asked them to solve an easy maths problem. Then each person gave their answer to the problem out loud. In every group, there was only one true participant. The other people in the group were actors. The psychologist asked the actors to purposely give a wrong answer. The true participant always answered last.

The psychologist recorded how many times the true participant gave the same wrong answer as the others in the group. She believed this happened because they had conformed.

Her results are shown in Table 1.

Table 1 Total number of times the true participants gave the same wrong answer as actors in different sized groups.

Use the results in Table 1 to draw a histogram.

Provide a suitable title and labels for your histogram.

What is the ratio of the number of times the participants gave the wrong answer when the group size was 2 compared to when the group size was 6?

Write this ratio in its simplest form.

Outline one conclusion that the psychologist could draw about conformity from the results in Table 1.

In research investigating conformity, participants are often not told the real reason for the research. This goes against the British Psychological Society guidelines on ethical issues.

Justify the use of deception in studies of conformity.

Task difficulty and expertise are two factors known to affect conformity.

Use an example to describe how each of these factors could affect conformity.

Briefly explain two weaknesses of laboratory experiments. Refer to Asch’s study of conformity in your answer.

Which two of the following statements about conformity are correct?

Shade two boxes.

You have been asked to design an experiment to investigate the effect of anonymity on conformity.

In your answer outline the following information:

• what your independent and dependent variables would be

• one thing you would do to standardise your procedure and why this would benefit your research

• the results you would expect to find from your experiment.

When carrying out the experiment you have outlined in your answer to Question 02.1 you should consider ethical issues.

Identify two ethical issues that you would need to consider.

Suggest one appropriate way of dealing with each of the issues you identify.

Ethical issue one

Ethical issue two

A psychologist conducted a study to see if people will conform to the opinion of others.

The psychologist put each participant into a group with seven strangers. The group was asked to compare the length of three different lines to the length of a single line. Each group member was asked to say out loud which of the three lines was the same length as the single line. The participants were asked to say their answers last.

The participants did not know that everyone else in the group was a confederate and was deliberately giving wrong answers.

The psychologist found that 91% of the participants conformed by giving a wrong answer at least once.

Use your knowledge of one social factor affecting conformity to explain these results.

Evaluate the study described in Question 2.1.

Use your knowledge of psychology to discuss peer influence and conformity to majority influence as possible explanations for addictive behaviours.