An experiment to investigate the degree to which social pressure from a majority group could affect a person to conform was conducted by Solomon Arch in the year 1950,The point of this analysis was to assemble significant information relating to the purposes for any demonstration and conduct that was depicted because of peer pressure (British Psychological Society, 2006). The significance of this essay to discuss the criticisms of Arch’s Experiment on group conformity, thereafter a conclusion will be drawn.
One confinement of the investigation is that he utilized a one-sided test. Every one of the members were male students who all had a place with a similar age group. This implies the investigation needs populace legitimacy and that the outcomes can’t be summed up to females or older groups of people(Longman,et al,1995).
According to Wren (1999) expresses that the experiments were done in the fifties. As such, experiments conducted in recent times cannot produce the same results. The author attributes his opinion to the fact that conformity was more prevalent in the fifties. In the 1950’s America was exceptionally moderate, engaged with an enemy of socialist witch-chase (which ended up known as McCarthyism) against any individual who was thought to hold thoughtful left-wing ideas.
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Adjustment to American qualities was normal. Backing for this originates from concentrates during the 1980s that show lower similarity rates (Perrin and Spencer, 1980). McCarthyism was widespread and the educational system followed a strict chain of command, this is so different from today’s society where people exercise their rights and are less ignorant.
Some critics thought the high levels of conformity found by Asch were a reflection of American, 1950’s culture and told us more about the historical and cultural climate of the USA in the 1950’s than then they do about the phenomena of conformity, However, there is documented (Eysenck, 2004) evidence that persons from collectivistic cultures (Africans) are more likely to conform than their counterparts from individualistic cultures (Americans). These factors shows that the results of the experiment were not conclusive as they overlooked other variables as mentioned above.
According to Hill (2001) the Asch conformity experiment had no ecological underpinnings. This simply means that the experiment and the findings could not apply in most real life situations. This is because the environment under which the experiment was conducted was controlled and there was no room for influence from other factors such as emotions, morals and personal perception. Asch reacted that he wanted to investigate a situation where the participants could be in no doubt what the correct answer was. In so doing he could explore the true limits of social influence.
There are ethical issues: participants were not protected from psychological stress which may occur if they disagreed with the majority. Evidence that participants in Asch-type situations are highly emotional was obtained by Back et al (1963) who found that participants in the Asch situation had greatly increased levels of autonomic arousal, this outcome also suggests that they were in a conflict situation, finding it tough to decide whether to report what they saw or to conform to the opinion of others.
Another criticism was that the Asch effect was a “child of its time.” They carried out an exact repetition of the original Asch experiment using engineering, mathematics and chemistry students as subjects. They found that on only one out of 396 trials did an observer join the erroneous majority (Perrin and Spencer, 1980).
Finally Asch also deceived the student volunteers claiming they were taking part in a ‘vision’ test; the real purpose was to see how the ‘naive’ participant would react to the behavior of the confederates. However, deception was necessary to produce valid results (Perrin and Spencer, 1980).
In conclusion Group pressure has been seen as the most prevalent cause of social problems because it leads to group think. This simply means that individuals feel obligated to agree to a dominant decision within a group. This leads to a situation whereby other opinions are suppressed and alternative solutions are not fully analyzed, the Asch experiment tried to determine the extent to which this is true. However, flaws and benefits have been documented as regarding to the validity of his experiment towards the research and studies of conformity. If the flaws are addressed and the benefits utilized, the experiment will remain to be the foundation of other studies not only at present times but also in future studies
