Social Psychological Knowledge

One of the most significant studies in the History of research into social psychology and conformity is that of Asch. His ‘lines’ experiment proved how a group of people ’the majority’ can influence the ‘minority’. Despite this, Asch’s methodology and validity of his experiments have been questioned. Larsen, Spencer and Perrin argue that Asch’s research is historically limited to the 1950’s a time when America was under the grip of McCarthyism and being different was feared, therefore, it can be justified that Asch’s study results were due to the year his experiment was conducted, therefore, his findings may not apply to modern day society. Asch’s research also lacks ecological validity, the fact he conducted his experiments within a laboratory setting means his results are not representative of the population and therefore, cannot be generalised, also, it is not often people are faced with making a judgment like the lines test he used where answers were plain to see. Asch’s experiment was also Ethnocentric, Androcentric and an unrepresentative sample as he only used American white male participants. In reviewing many other countries Smith and Bond found that cultural differences can actually impact on research results. They found that collective cultures such as Asia have a higher level of conformity than that of individualist cultures such as Britain. Proving how cultural influences can impact on the reliability and the validity of the studies that were conducted.

Moscovici (coloured tiles) on the other-hand argued that Asch ignored minority influence during his investigations. Moscovici found that a minority can have an influence over the majority if they are consistent in their approach. However, many researchers have ar...

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...ed that, before any discrimination can happen, people must be branded as members of an in-group or an out-group, however, the very act of ‘labelling’ by itself produces conflict and discrimination. Tajfel has also been criticised for the way he interpreted his results. Brown suggests that the behaviour of the boys can be seen in terms of fairness as much as discrimination. A major strength of his study was the high level of control he managed to retain. E.g., there was no face-to-face interaction between group members; the boys only knew of other group members by a code number; although the boys did not realise this, they were in fact assigned randomly to the two groups; the boys were only allowed to give points to others in their own or the other group and never to themselves and that they could not know what others would do or influence how the others behaved.