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Social Psychology - Coggle Diagram

- - - - Gender identity (2-3yrs): Child recognises and labels themselves as a boy or girl. Child might associate some behaviours or attributes with gender/sex, but has no stable concept about it.
        
        Gender stability (3-4yrs): Child recognises that their sex will not change over time but do not fully grasp the difference between sex and gender. E.g. if their father wore a dress, the might say he is now a woman.
        
        Gender constancy (>5yrs): Child realises that sex is a fixed state that will not change, and that even if someone's appearance or behaviour change, it does not make them a member of the opposite sex.
- - - - Method: created an experimental simulation of a prison in the Stanford University psychology department. Guards worked in sets of three, working 8-hour shifts and prisoners were confined 24 hours a day. To simulate authentic prison situation, participants were arrested without warning in their homes and taken to the local police station be fingerprinted, photographed and charged. Prisoners were given uniforms and referred to by number only Guards were also given uniform. Behaviour was observed.
        
        Results: Within hours, guards has begun harassing and insulting prisoners and assigning pointless punishments such as push ups. Prisoners became submissive and eager to please guards leading them to inform on each other. Prisoners suffered emotional breakdowns, one so severely that it led to the experiment being terminated. Incidents such as a rebellion and mass escape plan were also reported.
        
        Conclusion: people readily conform to the social roles they are expected to play, especially roles which are strongly stereotyped (e.g. prisoner and guard). Findings support situational, not dispositional explanation of behaviour.
        
        Evaluation:
        
        Limitations: findings could be explained by demand characteristics - post - study interviews asserted that they were just acting, thus, acting as a potential extraneous variable and lowering the ecological validity of the experiment. Lacked population validity - only male college students in USA, as well as small sample size (22). Highly unethical.
        
        Strengths: recorded conversations suggested that prisoners reacted to the situation as if it was real. Useful in deducing how status and power operate in groups.
  - - - Types of power
        
        Coercive power: being able to give negative consequences
        
        Expert power: having wanted or necessary special skills or knowledge.
        
        Informational power: having access to useful info or resources not readily available elsewhere.
        
        Legitimate power: a status or position which gives authority over those with less status or authority.
        
        Referent power: others wanting to be like them or liked by them.
        
        Reward power: Being able to give positive consequences or remove negative consequences.
- - - - Aim: to investigate what level of obedience would be shown when participants were told by an authority figure to administer electric shocks to another person.
        
        Participants: 40 male participants recruited using convenience sampling. Paid for participation.
        
        Results: created a phoney 'shock generator' clearly marked from 15-450 volts and each group of four switches had a label such as 'slight shock', and 'moderate shock' up to 'danger: severe shock' and 'XXX'. Participants were led to believe that selection of teacher/learner groups was random But roles were always the same: teacher (participant) and learner (confederate). Learner taken to room with shock chair (for authenticity) and teacher to an adjacent room with the 'shock generator' where the were given instructions for the task. task: teacher read a series of word pairs to learner who was asked to memorise pairs and then tested on them. When testing learner was given a word and then four others one of which was the pair, the indicated their response using buttons on chair. Teacher was instructed that if learner got an answer wrong they were to give a shock and for each wrong answer after they were to increase the shock level. Experiment would end when teacher left experiment or the reached 450 volts. Learner gave a set of predetermined answers: bang on wall at from 300-315 volts beyond which the were completely quiet and non-responding. A non-response was treated as a wrong answer. Participants were thoroughly debriefed and reunited with learner to prove that they were not actually hurt.
        
        Results: all obeyed up to 300 volts, 65% gave shocks up to 450 volts and the other 35% stopped sometime before.
        
        Conclusion: situational factors are strong influencers on human behaviour.
        
        Evaluation:
        
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  - - - Social proximity: increasing the social proximity/closeness of learner and teacher decreased obedience (e.g. to test proximity of teacher/learner in one scenario the teacher forced the learners hand on shock plate. To test proximity of authority figure experiments were ran where the experimenter gave instructions to the teacher via the phone.
      - Legitimacy of authority figure: decreasing legitimacy of authority figure decreased obedience (e.g. figure not wearing lab coat or looking dishevelled/unprofessional.
      - Group pressure: group pressure could either increase or decrease obedience depending of whether other members of the group also conformed. In another experiment Milgram introduced additional confederates who acted as teachers. when these confederates 'rebelled' and stopped administering shocks, participants were significantly more likely to follow. Conversely, when confederates administered shocks all the way through, participants were also more likely to do this. (Influence of conformity).
- - - - Participants: 50 male college students from USA. Believed they were participating in a vision test.
        
        Method: each participant was placed in room with seven confederates. Confederates agreed in advance what their response would be in response with the line judgement task. Participant was unaware. When presented with the line judgement task each person 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 was always at the end of the row and gave their answer last. Of the 18 total trials confederates gave the wrong answer for 12 (critical trials). Results measured number of times participant conformed with the majority view.
        
        Results: in critical trials one third (32%) of participants conformed, 75% conformed at least once and 25% never conformed. In control groups with no pressure to conform, less than 1% gave the wrong answer.
        
        Conclusion: study provides evidence that people will conform to fit in with the group (normative social influence because they believe that the group is better informed than they are (informative influence). Interviews with participants after the experiment confirmed this. Provides evidence of situational factors on behaviour.
        
        Evaluation
        
        Strengths: all participants were debriefed., its replicability - in further trials (1952, 1956) changed procedure to investigate which situational factors influence the level of conformity.
        
        Limitations: Unethical - deception (told they were doing a vision test and that other participants were genuine), did not take measures to protect participants from stress or harm they may experience if the disagree with the majority. Unrepresentative sample - lacked population validity, findings were a reflection of 1950s culture - lacked historical validity.
  - - - Unanimity: decreased unanimity = decreased conformity (even if only one person). This is known as ally effect which was shown in repetitions of Asch's experiment where having one confederate disagree reduced conformity by 80%.
      - Group size: groups up until 4 showed lower conformity, however in groups beyond 7 conformity slightly decreases as group size increases.
      - Deindividuation: this is a psychological state where people lose their sense of individuality and become anonymous as part of a group situation. Important factor in extreme behaviours e.g. riots/violence in sport stadiums. The size of the group leads people who would not usually participate in these behaviours to join in. An important contributor to this is anonymity: when part of a large group people can lose their sense of responsibility as its harder for them to be individually identified. Another factor is shift in attention: in large groups attention is shifted from the less and thus individuals focus less on reviewing their own actions and more on the behaviour of the crowd.
      - Culture: when Asch's experiment was repeated in different cultures it was found that conformity was lower in more individualistic cultures and higher in collectivist cultures.
      - Social loafing: occurs when people put less effort into an activity conducted as a group than they would if done individually causing them to outwardly conform with the group without considering their won opinion. More likely to occur when a task is perceived as easy/unimportant, the group is large, there is high social distance between group members, members are men, individual performance won't be judged and the task doesn't require maximum effort from everyone.
      - Informational influence: occurs when people conform due to wanting information ad guidance from others. HAs a higher influence on people who perceive being right as important, see themselves as being incompetent in that area and see the tsk as difficult.
      - Normative influence: occur in any situation where someone's actions are influenced by social norms. Conformity increases when people change their behaviours to match others to the are liked and accepted by the group.
- - - - Participants: 2655 visitors to pacific Forest National Park, USA. Park had reported problem behaviour of visitors stealing 14 tons of petrified wood each year.
        
        Method: naturalist experiment. Experiment had four independent variables: injunctive and descriptive normative information, and positive or negative statement wording. Dependant variable was proportion of wood stolen. Injunctive signs were: 'Please don't remove the petrified wood from the park' (negative) and 'Please leave petrified wood in park' (positive). Descriptive signs informed about past behaviour e.g. 'Many visitors have removed the petrified wood from the park, changing the state of the petrified forest' (negative).
        
        Results: messages that used descriptive normative information was most likely to increase theft, whereas messages that used injunctive normative information was most likely to reduce it.
        
        Conclusion: findings support the focus theory and that the type of normative information presented can dramatically alter how people respond to messaging.
        
        Evaluation
        
        Strengths: use of naturalistic experiment increases ecological validity, large sample (n = 2655) and fact that they used convenience sampling increases population validity as they were genuine park users.
        
        Limitations: Use of naturalistic experiment also makes it difficult to establish cause and effect due to relatively uncontrolled variables e.g. no evidence to suggest that park visitors altered their behaviour because of the sign or that they even read the signs.