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Transcript

Psychology

Social Influence

End of Topic Test Revision

Social Influence

Social influence is the process by which an individual’s attitudes, beliefs or behavior are modified by the presence or action of others.There are four areas of social influence - conformity, obedience, compliance and minority influence.

Conformity

Conformity is a change in beliefs or behaviour in response to real or imagined social pressure, and it is also known as majority influence.

This is the deepest form of conformity, where a person changes their views publically and privately.

Types of Conformity

There are three types of conformity, all of which have different situations and circumstances for them to happen. They range from shallow to deep, depending on how long they last and how much they affect the person.

Compliance

This is when a person changes in public, to fit in, but not privately, and it is a temporary change.

Identification

This is a deeper form of conformity, where a person changes their behaviour in accordance to a role.

Internalisation

Explanations of Conformity

One explanation of conformity is normative social influence, which is:

  • conforming in order to fit in
  • not wanting to be made fun of or left out
  • compliance
  • temporary

Another explanation of conformity is informational social influence, which is:

  • conforming in order to be right
  • when a person is unsure or lacks knowledge
  • internalisation
  • permanent

Key Study - Asch's Line Test

Investigating whether people would conform to a majority in a situation where the answer is obvious.

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Aim

Procedure

Findings

Conclusion

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Variables

Group Size

The larger the majority (number of confederates), the higher the rate of conformity.

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Unanimity

When one individual differed from the group, it was found that the rate of conformity decreased.

Task Difficulty

As task difficulty increased, so did the rate of conformity.

Evaluation

Strengths

  • Research support from Hogg and Vaughan, suggesting that the most effective majority is between 3 and 5 confederates

Limitations

  • Lacks ecological validity as it is down to a person's perception of the lines
  • Sampling issues as the study only tested men - can't be used as evidence of conformity in all people
  • Ethical issues as participants were decieved - told that it was an eyesight test
  • Artificial task and situation - doesn't apply to real life

The Stanford Prison Experiment

Investigating conformity to social roles

Evaluation

Strengths

  • Zimbardo had control over some variables, such as the selection of the participants - increases the internal validity and confidence in drawing conclusions from findings
  • Was realistic as prisoners began to talk about the prison as if it was real, and refering to each other by number - increases internal validity

Limitations

  • Lack of realism as the participants, in some cases, said that they were simply play acting and playing into stereotypes of guards and prisoners
  • Fromm accused Zimbardo of exaggerating the power of the situation to influence behaviour as only one third of guards behaved brutally
  • Lack of research support as replications of the experiment by Reicher and Haslam in 2006 showed opposite findings, with the prisoners taking control of the prison

Milgram's Research

Investigating obedience

Evaluation

Strengths

  • Good external validity as the environment accurately reflected authority relationships in real life - Hofling et al found that nurses obedience towards doctors had the same findings
  • Supporting replications from a French TV show with the same premise as Milgram's study - paid to give fake electric shocks to people in front of an audience

Limitations

  • Low internal validity as participants may not have believed in the set up, and therefore their actions had no consequences
  • Ethical issues as Milgram decieved his participants to believe that the electric shocks were real

Variables

Proximity

Obedience reduced when...

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Location

Obedience reduced when...

Uniform

Obedience reduced when...

Evaluation

Strengths

  • Research support from Bickman's field study in New York, investigating the relationship between obedience and uniform
  • Has been replicated in other cultures - Miranda et al found an obedience rate of over 90% amongst Spanish students - not limited to American males

Limitations

  • Lack of internal validity as Orne and Holland criticised that the experiment could have been seen as fake by the participants

Social-Psychological Factors

Agentic state is when a person believes that they are not responsible for their actions and are powerless to disobey an authority figure - they are an agent to the authority figure.

Autonomous state is the opposite to agentic state, and the shift between the two is called agentic shift.

Binding factors are what keep a person from realising the damaging affect that their behaviour is having, such as shifting responsibility to victims or denying the damage they're doing.

Evaluation

Strengths

  • Research support from Blass and Schmitt - showed a video about Milgram's study and asked who was at fault - the majority said that the experimenter was at fault rather than the participant

Limitations

  • Limited explanation - agentic shift does not explain the majority of findings, as it doesn't explain why some people didn't obey - agentic shift can only apply to some instances of obedience

Legitimacy of authority is when those at the top of the hierarchy are obeyed more, due to their social and hierarchical status - granted the power to be able to punish others.

Evaluation

Strengths

  • A useful account of cultural differences - Milgram's experiment was replicated in Australia, where only 16% of participants went all the way - increases validity of the experiment

Limitations

Dispositional Explanations

Authoritarian personality is the theory that some people are dispositionally more likely to follow the orders of authoritarian personalities - investigated by Adorno et al.

Measured against the F-scale, people were tested to see their opinions and viewpoints towards other racial groups - those high on the F-scale showed great respect to those of a higher status, making them more likely to obey.

Can be caused by parenting style - with extremely strict parenting, expectation of absolute loyalty, impossibly high standards and conditional love - creates hostility in the child and leads to scapegoating.

Evaluation

Strengths

  • A useful account of cultural differences - Milgram's experiment was replicated in Australia, where only 16% of participants went all the way - increases validity of the experiment

Limitations

Findings

Asch measured the number of times each participant conformed to the majority view. On average, about one third (32%) of the participants who were placed in this situation went along and conformed with the clearly incorrect majority on the critical trials. Over the 12 critical trials, about 75% of participants conformed at least once, and 25% of participants never conformed. In the control group, with no pressure to conform to confederates, less than 1% of participants gave the wrong answer.

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Aim

The aim of Asch's line study was to see whether conformity would occur, even when the answer to the question is fairly certain - this would therefore show the power of majority influence, also known as conformity.

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Conclusion

Why did the participants conform so readily? When they were interviewed after the experiment, most of them said that they did not really believe their conforming answers, but had gone along with the group for fear of being ridiculed or thought “peculiar." A few of them said that they did believe the group’s answers were correct. Apparently, people conform for two main reasons: because they want to fit in with the group (normative influence) and because they believe the group is better informed than they are (informational influence).

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Process

Using a line judgment task, Asch put a naive participant in a room with seven confederates/stooges. The confederates had agreed in advance what their responses would be when presented with the line task. The real participant did not know this and was led to believe that the other seven confederates/stooges were also real participants like themselves. Each person in the room had to state aloud which comparison line (A, B or C) was most like the target line. The answer was always obvious. The real participant sat at the end of the row and gave his or her answer last. At the start, all participants (including the confederates) gave the correct answers. However, after a few rounds, the confederates started to provide unanimously incorrect answers. There were 18 trials in total, and the confederates gave the wrong answer on 12 trials (called the critical trials). Asch was interested to see if the real participant would conform to the majority view. Asch’s experiment also had a control condition where there were no confederates, only a “real participant.”

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Group Size

Asch (1956) found that group size influenced whether subjects conformed. The bigger the majority group (no of confederates), the more people conformed, but only up to a certain point. With one other person (i.e., confederate) in the group conformity was 3%, with two others it increased to 13%, and with three or more it was 32% (or 1/3). Optimum conformity effects (32%) were found with a majority of 3. Increasing the size of the majority beyond three did not increase the levels of conformity found. Brown and Byrne (1997) suggest that people might suspect collusion if the majority rises beyond three or four. According to Hogg & Vaughan (1995), the most robust finding is that conformity reaches its full extent with 3-5 person majority, with additional members having little effect.

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Unanimity

The study also found that when any one individual differed from the majority, the power of conformity significantly decreased. This showed that even a small dissent can reduce the power of a larger group, providing an important insight into how individuals can resist social pressure. As conformity drops off with five members or more, it may be that it’s the unanimity of the group (the confederates all agree with each other) which is more important than the size of the group. In another variation of the original experiment, Asch broke up the unanimity (total agreement) of the group by introducing a dissenting confederate. Asch (1956) found that even the presence of just one confederate that goes against the majority choice can reduce conformity by as much as 80%. For example, in the original experiment, 32% of participants conformed on the critical trials, whereas when one confederate gave the correct answer on all the critical trials conformity dropped to 5%. This was supported in a study by Allen and Levine (1968). In their version of the experiment, they introduced a dissenting (disagreeing) confederate wearing thick-rimmed glasses – thus suggesting he was slightly visually impaired. Even with this seemingly incompetent dissenter, conformity dropped from 97% to 64%. Clearly, the presence of an ally decreases conformity. The absence of group unanimity lowers overall conformity as participants feel less need for social approval of the group (re: normative conformity).

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Task Difficulty

When the (comparison) lines (e.g., A, B, C) were made more similar in length it was harder to judge the correct answer and conformity increased. When we are uncertain, it seems we look to others for confirmation. The more difficult the task, the greater the conformity.

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Proximity

  • Location was changed to a run down office (47.5%)
  • Teacher and learner were in the same room (40%)
  • Teacher forced the learner's hand onto a plate (30%)
  • Experimenter gave orders over the phone (20.5%)
  • Experimenter was played by a member of the public (20%)

Unanimity

  • Location was changed to a run down office block, as the experimenter had less authority there

Uniform

  • The experimenter was played by a member of the public, who wasn't wearing any form of uniform, as opposed to an experimenter wearing a grey lab coat