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Social pysch - Coggle Diagram
Social pysch
Agency theory
Autonomous - individuals are acting on their own behalf and are responsible for their actions
Agentic - individual is acting on behalf of somebody else
In order for a person to make the agentic shift they must:
- Believe the person giving the order is a legitimate authority figure
- Believe the person giving the order will take full responsibility for their actions
The tendency to obey orders from an authority figure is innate and everyone is born with the potential to obey. This can then be affect by the socialisation of a person e.g culture and upbringing
Moral strain - occurs when someone is following an order that contradicts their moral conscience
- Can appear as either physical stress or defence mechanisms
- Relieved by making the agentic shift
Evaluation:
- Agentic shift supported by scientific evidence - Milgram showed 65% went to 450V. Evidence is highly controlled so has high validity and reliability.
C/A - not 100% so theory cannot explain why not all people obey - cannot account for ID so reductionist
- Moral strain (define) supported by Milgram - Ps showed distress e.g nervous laughter and sweating.
C/A - not a very scientific concept and cannot be measured. Makes theory less objective
- Applications - can be used to increase obedience in schools or prisons etc.
C/A - could be used to increase obedience to immoral orders
Milgram
A - to see if people would obey an immoral order from an authority figure
P - 40 men aged 20-50 recruited through volunteer sampling (newspaper add) each paid $4
M:
- Ps invited to yale and assigned either teacher or learner
- Taken to a room where learner strapped down and shock generator attached with a gel to prevent 'tissue damage'
- Test shock of 45V given to P
- P sat in front of shock generator and asked to shock learner when they got answer to word recall question wrong (started from 15V and went to 450V)
- Experimenter had 4 prods if P asked to stop: e,g The experiment requires that you continue
- Ps debriefed at end
R - 100% went to 300V and 65% went to 450V. Signs of moral strain: nervous laughter, sweating, pacing
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Social impact theory
Likelihood of someone obeying an order depends on:
- Strength - how much power the source has over the target
- Immediacy - how recent the order is and physical distance between source and target
- Number - the number of sources
Psychosocial law - first source has the most dramatic impact and each one after that generates less and less
Divisions of impact - more targets there are, the less impact the source has (diffusion of responsibility)
Social identity theory
- Social categorisation - when people classify themselves as part of a group
- Social identification - adopting characteristics of the group. Start viewing members as ingroup
- Social comparison - contrasting ingroup with outgroup to improve self esteem of group. Leads to outgroup prejudice
- AO1 = presence of groups alone causes prejudice
AO3 = Tajfel and Turner - minimal groups study - demonstrates how prejudice can arise
C/A - study highly artificial - may not be case in real life
- AO1 = describe 3 stages.
AO3 = suggests that everyone will demonstrate this behaviour but does not consider individual differences such as personality. E.g Adorno - high right wing authoritarian personality more likely to display prejudice.
- AO3 = can explain prejudice where conflict is not present e.g why children were hostile in Robbers Cave even before friction phase, which other theories such as RCT cannot.
More useful as can help us understand more examples of prejudice in society.
Burger (2009)
Generalisability - used both women and men, used a larger sample size than in Milgram's original study
C/A - removed a lot of people by screening for high levels of anxiety, any previous study of psychology etc. although this increases validity and makes study more ethical it reduces generalisability
Validity - due to Milgram's study being highly replicable Burger was able to replicate it more easily increasing the validity. Used the same script, same timings etc.
C/A in order to make study more ethical he made some adjustments:
- Only went to 150V assuming from this point all Ps would continue
- Ps only given 15V test shock instead of 45V
This means it is not an identical replication of Milgram's study reducing validity
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