5. Social influence Flashcards
What is conformity?
The convergence of one’s thoughts, feelings and behaviours with an external standard.
Acting differently from how we would if acting alone, in response to perceived or real pressure from others.
Conformity by omission- failing to act how you would if alone
Moving from one’s own position to a contradictory one
What are the different types of conformity?
Compliance: Conformity to achieve social rewards or avoid punishment. Public but not private.
Internalisation: genuine acceptance of the norm. Private and public.
Identification: conforming to establish or maintain relationship with other person or group. Not necessarily private
Ingratiational: conforming to gain favour or impress. e.g. sucking up to a teacher. Motivated by a social reward
Explain the study of Asch.
7-9 attendees were sitting together in a room taking part in what they believed to be a visual perception task. All attendees were confederates, the only true participant was someone who happened to be walking down the corridor and was told that an extra participant was needed.
Participants were asked to respond out loud to the line matching task and the true participant was always at the very end of the line and so was the last person to answer.
In a control condition, responses were recorded privately rather than out loud.
The task had an objectively correct answer; there was no ambiguity.
In 12/18 trials, confederates gave the same objectively incorrect response. There were 2 neutral trials where the correct response was given before confederates started giving the wrong answers.
Asch was trying to study independence rather than conformity and so was interested in finding the conditions in which participants did not conform.
RQ: How many people would maintain their independence in the face of social pressure and why?
Asch conducted post-experimental interviews to clarify reasons for responses.
Findings: the control group didn’t make any errors. In the experimental group, only 24 percent of participants retained their independence throughout, meaning at least 3 quarters gave at least some incorrect response. 5 percent conformed on every single trial.
We can infer that participants were influenced by the behaviour of others and conformed.
In post-experimental interviews, Asch found that one reason people conformed is because they experienced doubt about the appropriateness of their answer because everyone else’s answer was different. This is informational social influence- conforming because you see the norm as having some sort of informational value. This is internalisation.
Some people conformed because the wanted to fit in or not stand out. They recognised everyone else was wrong but wanted to gain approval or avoid disapproval from others. This is normative social influence and gives rise to compliance.
Explain compromised reactions in Asch’s study.
69 percent of participants gave at least one error in the line matching task but did not make an error every time.
There were 2 types of errors participants could make; the moderate error, where the erroneous response was the closest to the right answer, and the extreme error, where the erroneous response was the line most dissimilar to the one being matched.
When all confederates gave the extremely incorrect response, 19 percent gave the moderately incorrect response. This isn’t true non-conformity because people aren’t choosing the line they know to be correct but it’s also not true conformity they aren’t conforming to the norm of the group. Asch called this a ‘compromised reaction’.
Hodges and Geyer argued that we have to take into account that within this procedure participants are having to juggle multiple values simultaneously; personal integrity, meaning wanting to be correct, resect for others’ views, and respect for one’s own position in the group.
In this situation, giving the truthful response only satisfies personal integrity.
Choosing the moderately incorrect response in this situation is the closest to satisfying all the values as it shows the majority you’ve heard them, doesn’t deviate too far from the norm and maintains some level of personal integrity.
Explain conformity in moral judgements.
Kundu and Cummins studied whether the conformity effects Asch found could also be found in moral judgements.
Participants completed the Asch task but instead of shouting out answers in terms of the line they shouted out answers regarding what is and isn’t morally permissible in a series of moral dilemmas.
These dilemmas were pre-tested on people to find out what is seen as the moral response.
One dilemma was the trolley situation, in which most people think it is permissible to flip the switch to kill one instead of five, and the other was being told that if you don’t kill your own son someone will kill your own family, in which most people think it is impermissible to kill your own child.
In the study, confederates shouted out that it was permissible to kill your own child but not to flip the switch, the opposite of what is generally believed.
There was a control group which wasn’t exposed to other people’s views and ad to write down their answers- this tended to match the general public’s views. In the experimental group, participants tended to conform to the view of the confederates.
This study suggests that moral judgements can be swayed by their social contexts. Our attitudes, beliefs and values may just change according to those around us.
Explain Milgram’s study.
Milgram wanted to understand how ordinary people could end up participating in atrocious acts. This was in light of the second world war and trials showing that a large amount of it arose from people simply obeying orders. He wanted to know why people obey and how far they can be pushed before they disobey.
Participants were advertised for in a local newspaper and incentivised with money. The study was advertised as being about memory. Eligible participants went to a lab in a university and waited next to a confederate. Both the participant and the confederate were met by an experimenter who explained they were taking part in a study about the potential for physical punishment to be used as a way to encourage learning.
They drew slips from a hat to determine who would be the learner and who would be the teacher; it was rigged so that the confederate was always the learner.
The participant and learner were taken into adjacent rooms and the learner was strapped into an electric chair. The participant saw this happening and was told that the learner was going to receive electric shocks as part of the task. They were told they would have to rehearse word pairing with the learner and that the participant would then test the learner and give them an electric shock when they got it wrong. Participants themselves were given an example of the mildest form of shock.
The machine was labelled from mild shock to triple X. Confederates let out an audible cry of pain, and the learners protestations became more animated as the shocks came more severe. After 300v the learner stopped talking or crying out but started pounding on the wall of the room. Participants were told that if the learner doesn’t respond then it should be treated as an incorrect answer. After 315v there was no longer any response heard.
If participants raised an concerns or objections the experimenter in the room issued one of four commands; please continue, the experiment requires that you continue, it’s absolutely essential that you continue, you have no other choice, you must go on.
Milgram was interested in how far participants would go before stopping. He asked a panel of undergraduate psychology students to predict how far people would go and they estimated that only between 0 and 3 percent of peole would get up to 450v, the maximum voltage (we can consider this full obedience), and that the majority of people would leave much earlier.
Findings: 26/40 (2/3rds/65%) participants went all the way up to 450v, knowing they were causing profound physical damage to the learner.
Participants started to drop off at around the 300v mark.
It suggested that there isn’t anything inherently evil about people doing disastrous things; normal people are willing to obey the commands of people in authority al the way to the extent they might be murdering someone.
What is obedience?
The process of doing as one is told by an authority figure.
Why did so many people obey the experimenter in Milgram’s experiment?
- the experiment took place at a highly regarded US university so the experimenter should have been seen as being reputable
- the experiment had a worth purpose; participants probably saw what was being studied as significant and meaningful and so wanted to obey
- both the participant and the learner appeared to voluntarily submit to the authority of the experimenter and had obligated themselves to acting in the way the experimenter wanted them to act.
- the participant may have not known how to disobey or terminate the experiment
- there’s no completely satisfactory solution to the problem; either the participant has to prioritise the concerns of the learner, letting the experimenter down, or they have to prioritise the concerns fo the experimenter in getting the study done and in doing so incur the cost of having to hurt the confederate. Participants may have just prioritised the experimenters concerns over the confederates.
Explain the variations of his study Milgram conducted.
In the original study, 65 percent were obedient.
Proximity of experimenter: instructions were delivered over the phone. Obedience dropped to 21 percent; there was something important about the experimenter being physically present
Authority of situation: obedience dropped to 48% when the experiment was conducted in an office building
Presence of a dissenting confederate: obedience dropped to 10%. This may be because disobedient peers provide another source of information, if the feel discomfort they can look at their peer and if they are also experiencing discomfort then they are reinforced that wanting to stop is an acceptable response. Another reason is that people want to belong, and so by going against the preference of peers to risk disapproval from them.
Perceived authority of source: obedience fell to 20 percent when instructions were delivered by an ordinary person
Explain the study of Hofing et al.
Hofling et al. studied the relationship between doctors and nurses.
RQ: In situations in which the doctor violates an accepted procedure of which the nurse is usually in charge or when the nurse is instructed by the doctor to undertake a procedure which is against their professional standards, would the nurse actually obey their commands?
Researchers set up an experimental conflict in a real-life experiment- nurses in a real hospital received a call instructing them to give a patient a clearly excessive dose of medicine which was not authorised for use in that particular ward. The person giving instructions introduced themselves as a doctor but was not someone the nurses had spoken to before.
95% of nurses actually had to be stopped because they were on their way to the medicine cabinet to follow the instructions.
While Milgram’s study has been criticised for a lack of ecological validity, this shows that the findings have real-world applications.
Explain Zimbardo’s prison experiment.
This was supposed to be a simulation of a real world setting. The study set out to test two competing hypotheses about what leads people to engage in socially destructive acts; the dispositional hypothesis and the situational hypothesis.
Zimbardo created a simulation of a prison situation so he could explore whether if someone is arbitrarily assigned to being a guard or prisoner influence
Explain Zimbardo’s prison experiment.
This was supposed to be a simulation of a real world setting. The study set out to test two competing hypotheses about what leads people to engage in socially destructive acts; the dispositional hypothesis and the situational hypothesis.
Zimbardo created a simulation of a prison situation so he could explore whether if someone is arbitrarily assigned to being a guard or prisoner within that simulation, that assignment could influence how they responded to other people.
Participants responded to an advert in the local newspaper to take part in a study of prison life. They had to complete a questionnaire about their health, background and personality. This information was used to screen the participants to ensure that those who took part were all well-adjusted, physically and mentally healthy, high-functioning members of the community.
Of those that responded to the ad, the 24 who were considered to be the most mentally and physically stable, most mature and least likely to be involved antisocial behaviour were selected to take part.
Each participant was allocated to be a prisoner or guard. The prisoners were arrested at their house and taken to a genuine police station; this was done to make the situation as real as possible. After going to the police station the participants were taken to the ‘prison’ which was an area in the Stanford university psychology department which had been designed to look like a real prison.
The prisoners only had a mattress, sheet and pillow. Guards worked 8 hours a day.
There was an observation screen at the end of the corridor that allowed for video recording equipment and there was an observation area. This allowed for a range of different data to be collected; direct observation, questionnaires, interviews.
Guards were given minimal instructions on how to behave other than being told that the aim was to simulate a prison environment within the limits imposed by pragmatic and ethical considerations. They were told to maintain a reasonable degree of order within the prison to allow it to function and that there would be some unpredictable events that would occur and that it was their job as guards to be prepared and able to deal with this. To promote feelings of anonymity, participants were all given standard uniforms- the guards were given plain shirts and trousers, a wooden baton and sunglasses. The prisoners were given smocks with their ID number on the front and back. The prisoners weren’t allowed any personal belongings. The aim was to reduce individual uniqueness between the two groups.
Findings: the environment had a great impact on the emotional states of both prisoners and guards and on interpersonal processes that took place between and within those groups. The guards and prisoners became increasingly emotionally negative and their outlook became increasingly negative. Prisoners started to express intentions to harm others more frequently and their self evaluations became more deprecating. Over time, the guards and prisoners ended to become characteristically negative, hostile and dehumanising to each other and the prisoners started to become passive in their interactions whereas the guards assumed an active initiating role in all interactions. The reactions of both groups supported the situational hypothesis and their assignment seemed to shape how they behaved.
There were some individual differences in styles of coping. Some guards were tough but fair, some were creatively cruel and a few were passive and rarely instigated control over prisoners .
Zimbardo argues that the prison experiment tells us about the extraordinary power of situational forces and that the findings demonstrate the Lucifer effect, whereby people conform to the perceived demands fo the situation and obey the commands of others simply because of the situation in which they find themselves.
Some participants who played guards later expressed shock at their own behaviour.
Evaluate the stanford prison experiment.
Selection bias: Zimbardo chose the most normal participants that replied to his ad but it has been suggested that the ad was biased towards selecting more pathological participants. A subsequent study investigated whether the wording of the ad influenced the kind of people who respond. They did this by running Zimbardo’s ad in one newspaper and another version of the ad in another newspaper where instead of being described as a psychological study rather than ‘a study of prison life’. They found that those who indicated a willingness to sign up for a study about prison life rated more highly in social dominance, aggression and authoritarianism. This suggests that the people who signed up for the original study may have been prone to these traits.
Small sample- 24 participants. This means the findings have low generalisability
It wasn’t actually an experiment and no experimental methods were used. It doesn’t eet the definition of an experiment because no external variables which may have influenced how participants behaved were controlled for.
Zimbardo was actively involved in the study: a study showed that among a group of 150 students who were given a brief description of the procedures followed in the original experiment, 80 perecent correctly identified the hypothesis and 90 percent predicted that the behaviour of the guards would be hostile and oppressive. This suggests that demand characteristics would have impacted the study as they had likely detected and were conforming to the experimenter’s demands. It’s repeatedly been shown that the attitude and outlook of the person administrating study procedures can influence the results that emerge from the study. Zimbardo designed the study and his expectations were likely transferred to the participants. Guards were given clear guidance as to how to behave and gave clear instructions for the kind of hostile environment to create.
A real world prison guard was called in to advise on the study to make it more realistic and told Zimbardo some of the sadistic methods guards in real prisons use; these methods then happened to be seen in the findings which is unlikely a coincidence.
The study was subsequently rerun by British social psychologists and found that in a real-life experiment where participants were arbitrarily assigned to either prisoners or guards and found that they behaved much more cordially to each other.
Ethical implications
Explain Moscovici’s research.
Moscovici argued that the consistency of a minority and the fact that they stay resolute in maintaining a well-defined point of view and develop that point of view in a coherent manner is what creates the conditions that can lead to the minority bringing about change in the majority view point.
Within the majority, there is usually a diversity of opinions within the group. This means that there is potential uncertainty and conflict within the group, although it may be subtle, and so a minority that is consistent in insisting on their point of view which challenges the majority point of view can intensify that conflict within the majority because it suggests that the judgements and opinions of the minority have the same value as the majorities. Because they are sticking to their point of view it suggests there is something to that point of view and that the view warrants attention from the majority. The resoluteness indicates that the minorities point of view is a valid argument and that they have no intention of conceding or submitting to the majority point of view.
Moscovici studied this through a study about visual perception whereby he asked participants to rate whether particular colour swatches were actually blue. There was an objectively correct and incorrect response.
A group of 6 people had to take a colour perception task in order to eliminate those with visual impairments while also communicating to the rest of the group that everyone else in the group had normal vision.
Next participants had to look at a series of 36 slides and state what colour the slides were. The slides were unambiguously blue. Participants had to state out loud what the colour was. Everyone was a confederate other than one true participant who answered second to last.
In one condition, 2 confederates claimed that the blue slides were green and were consistent both with each other and with themselves across different trials.
In another condition, the 2 confederates answered blue on 12 trials and green on 24 trials, meaning there was some inconsistency.
In one condition, there was no minority. This was the control condition.
It was found that where the minority was consistent in their views, 8.5% of participants across trials endorsed the minority’s point of view- participants agreed on 8.5% of trials that the blue slide was green.
Where the minority was inconsistent, only 1.25 percent reported that the blue slides were green. In the control group, this only happened on 0.25% of trials.
There was significantly greater conformity when the minority was consistent.
Moscovici followed this up by doing a variant on this experiment where he asked participants to not only shout out the responses but also write down their true views as to the colour of the slide. This would allow him to examine the extent to which the minority view had been internalised.
He found that those who were exposed to a consistent minority were significantly more likely to internalise the view of the minority.
Where there’s a minority, as long as they are being consistent, they can lead people to doubt an unambiguous situation.
Moscovici argues that where the minority is consistent, it says to the majority that there is a potentially valid argument happening which warrants deeper consideration and processing. Processing the argument is more likely to lead to a greater depth of influence of the minorities point of view and internalisation. This argument is referred to as conversion theory.
