I am an undergraduate psychology student hoping to make a difference!
03/05/2012 References:
Amir, T. (1984). The Asch conformity effect: a study in Kuwait. Social Behavior and Personality, 12 (4), 187-190. Retrieved March 4, 2012, from the EBSCOhost database.
Rock, I. (1990). The Legacy of Solomon Asch: Essays in Cognition and Social Psychology. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Walter Reed Army Medical Center (1958). An experimental investigation of group influence. Symposium on Preventive and Social Psychiatry, Part 3 (pp. 17-25). Washington, D.C.: National Research Council (U.S.).
03/09/2012 Wikipedia Project
References:
Hanayama, A., & Mori, K. (2011). Conformity of six-year-old children in the Asch experiment without using confederates. psychology, 2(7), 661-664. doi:10.4236/psych.2011.27100.
Stowell, J. R., Oldham, T., & Bennett, D. (2010). Technology and teaching: Using student response systems ("clickers") to combat conformity and shyness. Teaching of Psychology, 37, 135-140. doi: 10.1080/00986281003626631.
Hope to Accomplish:
According to the APS Wikipedia Initiative page, the article on Asch’s conformity experiment “lacks content, references, structure, and links to relevant materials.” The article is broken up into three main headings: an introduction to the experiment, what the experiment consisted of, and the results of the experiment. The article itself does a very good job of explaining Asch’s experiment in basic terms. Many of the existing references are Asch’s original reports and findings, which is wonderful, but they are not used or scattered throughout the article. The article does not go into any detail as to how Asch’s experiments with conformity have been applied since, or why Asch developed the experiment in the first place.
What I want to do with the article is this:
• Using the resources I have found and with those already present, I hope to provide more references within the actual article to help verify the statements made by the original author.
• I am also hoping to maybe provide a bit of background on what inspired Asch to perform the experiment (if I can find a reference for it, I’m pretty sure it had something to do with Nazi Germany), or what it has been applied to.
I am not sure if that is taking on too much or not enough, but if I can focus mainly on the references, maybe polishing the already-written article where it is needed, and perhaps the origins of the experiment, I feel that would add to the reliability of the article.