A study that criticises Asch is by William & Sogon (1984) who claimed that the group Asch created did not reflect all groups found in society. They found that majority influence was significantly greater among friends than among strangers. Therefore Asch failed to realise that he could have obtained much stranger majority influence if he had replaced groups of strangers with an in0group of friends of the genuine participants & consequently this limits Asch findings to only groups of strangers & as a result lacks generalisability to other populations.
And to support this Abrams et al (1990) argued that 1st year psychology participants would show more conformity if the other group members were perceived as belonging to an in group (other 1st yr psychology students) than if they were perceived as belonging to an out group (history students). Eagli & Carli (1981) criticise Asch study for being gender biased. They claim that in Western societies a masculine bias exists & as a consequence women show higher levels of conformity than men in the Asch study. They also found that in feminist societies, women actually show less conformity than men.
This criticises Ash because he ignored complex gender characteristics that would have affected his results. Also David & Turner (1996) criticise Asch by claiming that he ignored group dynamics that exist in real society. For example, many minorities show considerable influence on the wider group i. e. gay rights. This criticises Asch because conformity can either be with the group on the minority, but can also be the other way round. A more recent study to criticise Asch is by Smith & Bond (1993). They reviewed American Asch studies & concluded that conformity levels had declined since Asch original study in 1955.
The average conformity rate was 30% with the highest being 58% from Indian teachers in Fiji. Therefore it seems that Asch results may have been a product of the time & the culture of 1950s America A study that supports Asch was conducted by Sheriff in 1932. In this study Sheriff found that with an ambiguous task, groups would polarize estimates of a line judgement task over numerous trials, rather that sticking to their original estimates. This supports Asch because it demonstrates that groups can crate an information influence over each other & that pressure can create conformity to the group
Similarly, Jenness (1936) support Asch in that when asking participants to estimate how many sweets were in a jar (ambiguous task), people would change their responses towards a group norm if they were allowed to see other people responses. This supports Asch in that the groups provide pressure based on the information they give. This pressure resulted in conformity to stooge response in both Jenness & the Asch experiment. Dutch & Gerald call this type of pressure information influence. A study supporting Asch is by Perin & Spencer (1980) who reproduced Asch experiment in the UK believing that UK citizens would conform less than Americans.
Their study showed a very low level of conformity; however they had selected their participants from universities using engineering students. This could be due to the fact that engineer students are trained to make exact measurements & so had the confidence in their skills in making accurate observations & so it could be considered a slightly biased sample not representative of ordinary people in UK. When they performed the test on ordinary people the result was 32% conformity; very close to Asch findings and so it supports Asch conclusion that the tendency for conformity is a powerful influence on our behaviour