Please enable JavaScript.
Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.
Social Influence (Confomity (Majority Influence (Sherif (1935) tested…
Social Influence
Confomity
Majority Influence
Sherif (1935) tested conformity using the autokinetic effect [when a small spotlight projected in a dark room appears to move even though it's still]. He first asked ppts independently to estimate how far the light moved and it varied considerably.
Found that over numerous trials, the group converged to a common estimate. The person who's estimate was greatly different to the other two conformed to their view. This shows that people would always tend to conform rather than make individual judgements.
In an ambiguous situation, a person will look to others for guidance. They want to do the right thing but may lack the appropriate information and observing others can provide this information. This is known as informational conformity
Ppts were tested in groups of 3 which were chosen by Sherif so that there was 2 members with similar estimates and 1 with a very different estimate. They had to say out loud how far they thought the light had moved
Asch (1951) felt that Sherif's autokinetic effect based experiment was too ambiguous and believed that a better test of conformity would be if the task was unambiguous.
Devised a line judgement task where the answer was obvious. If the participant gave an incorrect answer, it would be clear that this was due to group pressure. He put a naive ppt in a room with 7 stooges and the stooges agreed in advance what their responses would be during the task.
In a total of 18 trials, the stooges gave the wrong answer in 12 trials (called the critical trials). In the critical trials, 75% of the ppts conformed at least once, and 25% of ppts never conformed. In the control group, less than 1% gave the wrong answer
An interview revealed that most of them didn't believe their conforming answers were right, but had gone along with the group for fear of being ridiculed or thought 'peculiar'. A few of them said that they really did believe the group's answers were correct. There are two main reasons they conform: [refer to the two types of social influence]
-
Minority Influence
Moscovici (1969) predicted that a minority could influence the answers of the majority if they consistently stated the blue slide was green. Each group had 6 people, 4 naive ppts and 2 stooges. There were 36 trials and 3 conditions.
- Consistent condition: Stooges always called it 'green'
- Inconsistent condition: Stooges said green 24 times and blue 12 times
- Control condition: No stooges, 6 ppts in the group
RESULTS
- 8% said green - much more than other conditions
- 1.25% were green responses
- less than 1% were green responses - so the correct answer was clear
A consistent minority can influence majority decisions even when the answer is clearly wrong. Consistency of their answers seems to be important. With majority influence the influence is seen from the start, with a consistent minority it shows after a while
Deindividuation
Negative behaviours are more likely to happen when an individual is anonymous to outsiders and/or the individual lacks self-awareness about how they are evaluated by others
Bandura, Underwood, and Fromson (1975) provided subjects with the opportunities to behave punitively under diffused or personalised responsibility towards groups that were characterised in either humanised, neutral or dehumanised terms
Dehumanisation and lessened personal responsibility enhanced aggressiveness, with dehumanisation serving as the more potent disinhibitor. Escalation of aggression under conditions of dehumanisation was especially marked when punitiveness was dysfunctional in effecting desired changes
The uniformly low level of aggression directed toward humanised groups, regardless of variations in responsibility and instrumentality of the conduct, attested to the power of humanisation to counteract punitiveness
Dehumanisation fostered self-absolving justifications that were in turn associated with increased punitiveness.
Group Performance
Social Facilitation
Zajonc (1965) had cockroaches run in either easy tunnels or hard tunnels and timed how long it took for these cockroaches to run from the start to the finish. The easy tunnel just needed them to run in a straight line. The hard tunnel was in the shape of a cross. The cockroaches either ran alone or with others to study the effects of social facilitation
Results
Social facilitation only helped the cockroaches on the easy tunnel. The heightened arousal allowed them to complete it faster than they did alone, but when addressing the hard tunnel, the presence of other cockroaches actually had an adverse effect and slowed down their times as compared to the solo time trials
-
Social Loafing
The tendency for individual members of a group to become increasingly less productive as the size of their group increases
Ringelmann (1913) took a rope and asked individuals to pull on it. He then asked the same people to pull on the rope as a group. He observed that when pulling the rope in a group, they put in less effect than when pulling on their own.
Things that increase social loafing: low risk of being evaluation, meaningless tasks, low uniqueness of individual outputs, larger group size, and easy as opposed to complex tasks.
-