Limitations of Asch’s Experiment

A lab experiment was carried out, with 50 male student participants, seven confederates and one real participant. They were asked to compare which comparison line was the same as the target line. Confederates gave the wrong answer and the aim was to see whether the participant would conform. The results of this experiment were that 32% of participants conform and over 75% of participants conformed at least once over 12 trials. However, when comparing to a control group with no confederate, less than 1% of participants answered incorrectly. Asch concluded that participants conform due to two factors. Firstly, due to normative social influence where participants conform because they want to be like by others in the group. Secondly, due to informational social influence where participants genuinely believe that the confederates are correct.

Although it suggests that 32% of the participant conformed, it fails to recognize that 68% of the participants did not conform, showing that there are other factors that may be causing the differences between different groups of participants, such as individual differences.

The limitations of Asch’s experiment is that participants used are all from the same age group and therefore it lacks population validity and hence cannot be used to generalize findings to other age groups or female. They only used students in this experiment which is another limitation as students are found to have a higher order thinking when compare to the rest of the population and therefore they are less likely to conform and so cannot be used to generalise findings to others who are not students.