Psychology: Social influence booklet

Conformity

Obediance

Social influence

Types of conformity:

Conformity Studies:

Explanations of conformity:

Obedience Studies:

Explanations of Obedience:

Resisting Social influence:

Factors in minority influence:

Social change social influence process:

Evaluation

Compliance: This is where a person will outwardly change their beliefs but in private will not change their beliefs at all.

Identification: This is where the person changes their public and private beliefs but only does so in the presence of a group and when they leave that group, the beliefs change.

Internalisation: This is where a belief is held to be true both outwardly and internally regardless of other conditions, this full conformity.

Asch study: In this study Asche got 50 male students to participate in a vision test and put each one in a room with 7 confederates who would all be doing a test to see if they could tell what line that they had been given, was identical to one of three on another piece of paper.


Findings: Asch found that on average a third of the participants conformed with clearly incorrect answer and out of all of the participants 75% of the participants conformed at least once.

Zimbardo prison experiment: Zimbardo has 75 volunteers and 24 of them were chosen to be mentally stable enough to participate in the activity and those were paid $15 a day. The participants were randomly assigned to the role of either participants or guard and the prisoners were taken from their home without warning and were booked and taken to the underground of stanford university where they were put in makeshift cell's.


Findings: Those who were assigned the role of guards quickly began harassing the prisoners and did things such as waking them up at 2am for body counts. The guard would give out physical punishment and the prisoners even rebelled. One prisoner even began to act crazy and heard others calling him a bad prisoner and after trying to leave the experiment decided to come back.

One explanation is Informative social influence: This is where people conform because they wish to gain knowledge or they conform because they conform with who they believe is right.

Another is Normative social influence: This is where people conform in order to be accepted or belong to a group and therefore they may be wrong but they are only conforming in order to fit in.

Milgram study: Milgram recruited volunteer's who were males from 20-50 who's jobs ranged. They were paid $4.50 for showing up. They picked straws and were tricked into thinking that this was fair but the confederate always got learner and there was a experimenter who was in a lab coat who was an actor. The learner was attached to an electric shock device which the participant believed was real and whenever the learner got a question wrong the learner would fake being shocked with increasing amounts each time all the way up to 450v. The learner mainly answered wrong and would do fake screams in order to trick the participant into thinking they were shocking someone.


Findings: 65% of the participants went all the way up to 450v and 85% went up to 350v all whilst the confederate would be making noises of pain behind a wall that they could hear through.

One explanation is The Agentic state: This is where an individual will follow the wishes of another person with very little responsibility for their actions. Milgram argued that when faced with social situations they can choose to act autonomously or enter the agentic state.

Another explanation of obedience is Legitimacy of authority: This is referring to the level of social power held by someone who may be asking or commanding you to do something, the more authority a person has the more likely we are to mindlessly accept their commands obediently.

Another explanation is The authoritarian personality: This is where a person had an extreme respect for authority coined by Adorno et al (1950.) They have four main features of this. Might is right: Which is where they believe that out-groups harm society and therefore hate all groups that do not traditionally fit in. -Upbringing: Which is where a harsh strong punishments were administered for little things and there was a rigid upbringing. Personality traits: The most common in an authoritarian personality is tunnel vision and general hostility towards other groups. An authoritarian personality trait can be assessed using the F scale which is a quiz used to test for authoritarian traits in a person.

One explanation for the resistance of social influence is a high internal locus of control. This is where people believe that they are responsible for the things that happen in their own lives. This means that people are more likely to not be influenced by others as they know they are responsible for their own actions.

Another explanation for resisting social influence is social support: This is where there could be a potential disagreement with the group and a dissenter (someone who goes against the group idea,) will argue against this providing moral support which helps to resist and social influence. In summary another non-conformist can help to resist social influence.

This is where there is a consistent effort by the minority to try and convince the majority which can lead to the majority listening if the right conditions are met. These conditions are
Consistency: Which is where the minority continues to try to push its same point without giving up, which can convince a majority as it can make it seem like a worthy cause.
Commitment: This is where a minority would continue over time to put forward the same message which eventually insights interest in the majority.
Flexibility: If the minority is unbending in their position then they will not be accepted as this is off putting and therefore does not help so the minority must be flexible in their accepting of others and their beliefs.

There are four main social change processes. Drawing attention to the cause: This is where rally's and speeches play a part in making a cause recognised by the majority of people. Then Consistency of the minority: This is where the minority is persistent in their efforts. Commitment: Which is where the people show that they are fully about the cause and this causes others to become interested. Finally Flexibility: This is where the group advocating change, is flexibel to those who do conform.

Asch Study:
-: The generalisability of the Asch study could be seen as low because the high levels of conformity may be due to the time in which the experiment happened, therefore the Asch study could be seen to have low temporal validity.
+: However it could be seen as highly reliable as it uses standardized procedures making it easily replicable.
+: The Asch study also has good practical applications: Namely that juror's are now warned about level of conformity in groups and are advised to make their own decisions despite what others say.
-: However it could be seen to have low external validity as it was done in a lab and therefore cannot be applies to real life.
-: Also there are slight ethical issues involved as the participants did not sign an informed consent form.

The Zimbardo stanford prison experiment:

  • The generalisability of this experiment could be seen as low as the levels of conformity may be due to the era (1973) and therefore this study suffers from low temporal validity. Also the participants were only white and male so the behavior could not be generalised to other races or genders.
    +: However this study is very reliable as it uses standardised procedures meaning that the experiment could be re-done and can be checked for methodological issues.
    +: There are important practical applications that can be noticed from this study, mainly that a person's environment can have a massive impact on the way that they act and even how they see themselves.
    -: However there are also obvious Ethical issues with this as a whole as the participants obviously went under some sort of psychological strain and were put under very harsh conditions.

Explanations for conformity:
+: A strength of NSI is research done by Asch that found a 37% conformity rate to a wrong answer when 7 others gave that answer. This could also suggest that ISI was an important part of this as participants said that due to there being a large consensus the group must be right.
-: However it can only be one of these and so they serve as Alternative explanations for another and therefore both can be seen as weak.
-: Also the type of conformity shown by Asche is very different from conforming to taking a cigarette from a friend and therefore it is impossible to apply this theory to real life situation's.
+: There are positive practical applications for normative social influence which is that knowing that we are capable of being swayed by what people around us say, is useful in avoiding negative conformity.

Milgram's Study:

  • One problem is a lack of generalisability: Due to the experiment being performed on middle class white males this study is not fully generalisable.
    +: However this study does have high reliability, due to the standardised procedures meaning that the study can be easily replicated.
    +: There are also strong practical applications for the study as it shows people's willingness to do bad things due to their obedience to an authority figure.
    -: One negative of the Milgram experiment is that it breaks ethical guidelines as some could argue that the participants underwent psychological stress.

The Agentic state and legitimacy of authority:
+: A strength of the agentic state is that Milgram's research shows that people often enter this state and conform as 65% of people shocked all the way up to 450v
+: A strength of the legitimacy of authority is that Milgram found that when wearing a lab coat there were far higher levels of conformity.
-: Both of these explanations could be considered to be alternative explanations of one another and therefore both of these explanations could be considered to be weak.
-: One problem of these explanations however is that they can both be used as an 'obedience alibi' which leads to excusing awful behavior by blaming it on authority, as the Nazi's attempted to do.
+: One strength is that being aware that we can be in this state can prevent horrible actions though stopping people from simply becoming puppets of those in authority.

Authoritarian personality:
+: There is research to support this done by Elms and Milgram which showed that those who shocked more scored higher on the F scale which suggests that the authoritarian personality played a role.
-: However the authoritarian personality could be seen as one explanation and some could say that there are more likely alternative explanations such as the agentic state.
-: However Middendorp and Meloen found that less-educated people are consistently more authoritarian so potentially it is not the authoritarian personality that causes obedience it could be a lack of education that causes both.

Resisting social influence: Social support
+: There is evidence for this in Asch's study as when Asche has even on of the other confederates not conform to an answer, Asch found that the participant was far less likely to conform.
-: However the social support explanation for resisting social influence could be seen as incomplete as there are alternative explanations for resisting social influence.
-: However all of the research could be seen as reductionist as it does not account for personal differences and therefore there is a far too simple view taken by this approach.
+: This could be seen as a strong approach however as it is shown by minority groups who need social support in order to inspire social change.

Resisting social influence: Internal locus of control:
+: There is research to support this theory. Spector investigated locus of control and conformity with 157 patients and found that those who had a higher external locus of control conformed more and were more likely to conform to social situations than those who has a low internal locus of control.
+: Also this approach is seen to be a far better explanation of conformity with social support not always showing a decrease in conformity rates with a locus of control showing a more consistent result.
-: However Rotter pointed out that LOC only has an influence in novel situations and in a situation where previous experience already exists that will have more of an influence.

Minority influence:
+: There is research to support this theory. Moscovici found that when minority groups were having to convince people, a consistent message was in fact far more successful suggesting that this theory is correct.
-: However the research on minority influence is lacking as it does not have good external validity and is very limited in what it can tell us about real life minority influence.
+: One strength is the practical application's as now that we know what is best for minority groups to protest with, there can be more drastic social change made for the better.

Processes in social change:
+: There is research to support this theory as Moscovici studies the consistency condition and found that those who were consistent in their messages caused a 8.4% conformity rate as opposed to 1.3% in inconsistent groups.
-: However there are methodological issues with this research as it lacked ecological validity and therefore it potentially cannot be applied to real life situations.
+: One strength of this is that it can be seen as a holistic approach as it considers a number of factors in the potential for a movement to cause social change.