Outline and Evaluate Research Into Majority Influence Essay Example
Outline and evaluate research on majority influence
There are two major studies in which we can look, at these are Asch and Zimbardo. Asked our student volunteers to take part in the vision test, all but one of the volunteers were colleagues of the experimenter. the volunteers were shown 3 lines the free lines were all different sizes and there was a fourth line which was the same size as one of the 3 lines. All the volunteers had to do was to say Which line was the same size as the separate fourth line. Altogether there were 123 American undergraduates being tested. Asch showed a series of lines to participants seated around a table, participants always answered in the same order. The colleagues were instructed to give the same incorrect answer on 12 of the 18 trials. On 12 critical trials 36.8% of the participants got the answer incorrect in other words they conformed with the majority. A quarter of the participants did not conform on any of the trials. Although people did conform the size of the group depended on how many people conform e.g. if there was a large group and they all said the wrong answers the participant will become suspicious and not conform. Also the participants profession could make a difference on whether they conform e.g. a maths teacher will realise that the size of the line is the same as they work with this sort of thing every day. When the difference between the sizes of the lines decreased, making it harder to distinguish the difference between the lines, the level of conformity increased. this study was only conducted on American men during a period of time when people were scared to be different. another weakness is that only one third of participants conformed the other participants stuck and gave the right answer or the answer they thought was right The next study is Zimbardo's Stanford prison experiment. To conduct this experiment a mock correctional facility was constructed in the basement of Stanford University, an advert was
There are two major studies in which we can look, at these are Asch and Zimbardo. Asked our student volunteers to take part in the vision test, all but one of the volunteers were colleagues of the experimenter. the volunteers were shown 3 lines the free lines were all different sizes and there was a fourth line which was the same size as one of the 3 lines. All the volunteers had to do was to say Which line was the same size as the separate fourth line. Altogether there were 123 American undergraduates being tested. Asch showed a series of lines to participants seated around a table, participants always answered in the same order. The colleagues were instructed to give the same incorrect answer on 12 of the 18 trials. On 12 critical trials 36.8% of the participants got the answer incorrect in other words they conformed with the majority. A quarter of the participants did not conform on any of the trials. Although people did conform the size of the group depended on how many people conform e.g. if there was a large group and they all said the wrong answers the participant will become suspicious and not conform. Also the participants profession could make a difference on whether they conform e.g. a maths teacher will realise that the size of the line is the same as they work with this sort of thing every day. When the difference between the sizes of the lines decreased, making it harder to distinguish the difference between the lines, the level of conformity increased. this study was only conducted on American men during a period of time when people were scared to be different. another weakness is that only one third of participants conformed the other participants stuck and gave the right answer or the answer they thought was right The next study is Zimbardo's Stanford prison experiment. To conduct this experiment a mock correctional facility was constructed in the basement of Stanford University, an advert was