Nash Psychology

Asch (1951) devised an experiment whereby there was an obvious answer to a line judgement task. If the participant gave an incorrect answer it would be clear that this was due to group pressure.

Aim: Solomon Asch conducted an experiment to investigate the extent to which social pressure from a majority group could affect a person to conform.

Procedure: Asch used a lab experiment to study conformity. Using the line judgement task (see above), Asch put a naive participant in a room with seven confederates. The confederates had agreed in advance what their responses would be when presented with the line task. The real participant did not know this and was led to believe that the other seven participants were also real participants like themselves. Each person in the room had to state aloud which comparison line (A, B or C) was most like the target line. The answer was always obvious. The real participant sat at the end of the row and gave his or her answer last. In some trials, the seven confederates gave the wrong answer. There were 18 trials in total and the confederates gave the wrong answer on 12 trails. Asch was interested to see if the real participant would conform to the majority view.

Results: 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.

Conclusion: Why did the participants conform so readily? When they were interviewed after the experiment, most of them said that they did not really believe their conforming answers, but had gone along with the group for fear of being ridiculed or thought “peculiar”. A few of them said that they really did believe the group’s answers were correct.

In stark construct to today’s vacuous reality television shows, Candid Camera provided viewers with a fascinating glimpse into the human psyche by using hidden cameras to film ordinary people being confronted with unusual situations.

Check out this segment illustrating just how strongly we feel the need to conform to the behaviour of the “group” – even when it makes no sense whatsoever.

Welcome to my blog and I hope that you thoroughly enjoy A Level Psychology and are ready for some hard work!  I advise you to join the British Psychological Society, especially if you would like to read Psychology at University.

Membership has many benefits and will look impressive on your University UCAS application.

Click here to read about the benefits and join!

 Sophie Lancaster was brutally kicked to death and her boyfriend beaten into a coma just for being different. There is a petition on the Official 10 Downing Street Website, requesting the Prime Minister widen the definition of ‘Hate Crime’, to include crimes committed against a person or persons, on the basis of their appearance or subcultural interests.

This video footage shows John Darwin as he is brought in custody following his reappearance last year. The audio you hear is of a police interview where he confesses how he began the elaborate deception.

Click here to watch a mockumentary that students created for homework.  

Here is a nice overview of a range of non-intrusive brain imaging that are used in a number of your core studies such as Maguire, Dement & Kleitman.