A03 Evaluation All Topics Flashcards
Lucas eat al (2006) - research supporting informational social influence.
- He asked students to give answers to mathematical problems that were easy or more difficult. There was greater conformity to incorrect answers when they were difficult rather then when they were easier. —> this was most true to those who rated their maths ability as poor.
- study shows that people conform in situations where they feel they don’t know the answer which is the outcome of ISI - we look to other people and assume they know better than us and must be right.
McGhee and Teevan - individual differences in normative social influence
They found that students in high need of affiliation (a need for being in a relationship with others) were more likely to conform.
- this shows that the desire to be liked underlines conformity for some people more than others. Therefore there are individual differences in the way people respond.
Aschs research (Weakness) - Perrin and Spencer (1980)
Repeated Asch’s original study with engineering students
- Only one student conformed in a total of 396 trials.
- It may be that the engineering students felt more confident about measuring lines than the original sample, therefore were less conformist.
- possible that the 1950s (when Asch carried out his research) were an especially conformist time in America, and therefore it made sense to conform to established social norms
- limitation because it means the Asch effect is not consistent across situations and may not be consistent across time
Aschs research
(Weakness) - Fisk - 2014
- The task of identifying lines was relatively trivial and therefore there was really no reason not to conform.
- although the naïve participants were members of a ‘group’, it didn’t really resemble groups that we are part of in everyday life.
- He stated that aschs groups were not very groups
- This is a limitation because it means that the findings do not generalise to everyday situations.
Aschs research
Weakness - limited application
Neto - 1995
Bond and smith - 1996
Neto - women might
be more conformist, possibly because they are more concerned about social relationships (and being accepted) than men are
Bond and smith - The men in
Asch’s study were from the United States, an individualist culture, Similar conformity studies conducted in collectivist cultures (such as China where the social group is more important than the individual) have found that conformity rates are higher, such cultures are more oriented to group needs
Zimbardos research - strength - well controlled
- some control over variables
- emotional stable individuals chosen and randomly assigned to roles of guardian and prisoner. One way in which the researchers tried to rule out individual differences as an explanation of the findings
- having such control over variables increases the internal validity of the study. - much more confident in drawing conclusions about the influence of roles on behaviour.
Zimbardos research - Weakness - lack of realism. - banuazizi and Mohavedi (1975)
- accused Zimbardo of exaggerating the power of the situation to influence behaviour, and minimising the role of personality factors
- only a minority of the guards behaved in a brutal manner. Another third were keen on applying the rules fairly. The rest actively tried to help and support the prisoners, sympathising with them, offering them cigarettes and reinstating privileges
Zimbardos research - Weakness - dispositional influences - Fromm 1973
accused Zimbardo of exaggerating the power of the situation to Use your knowledge of conformity to social roles to explain
in uence behaviour, and minimising the role of personality factors.
- for example only minority of guards behaved in a brutal manner. Another third were keen on applying the rules fairly
- the rest actively tried to support help and support the prisoners, sympathizing with them, offering them cigarettes and reinstating privileges - zimbardo 2007
- suggests that Zimbardo’s conclusion – that participants were conforming to social roles – may be over-stated.
Milgrams research - weakness
Orne and holland - 1968
Gina Perry - 2013
Sheridan and king - 1972
- argued that participants behaved the way they did because they didn’t really believe in the set up – they guessed it wasn’t real electric shocks. In which case Milgram was not testing what he intended to test, i.e. the study lacked internal validity - Gina Perry’s (2013) recent research confirms this. She listened to tapes of Milgram’s participants and reported that many of them expressed their doubts about the shocks
Sheridan and King (1972) - conducted a similar study where real shocks were given to a puppy. Despite the real shocks, 54% of the male student participants and 100% of the females delivered what they thought was a fatal shock.
Milgrams research - strength - good external validity
Hofling et al 1966
- his study was conducted in a lab
- Milgram argued that the lab environment accurately reflected wider authority relationships in real life.
- Other research supports this argument - Hofling et al. (1966) studied nurses on a hospital ward and found that levels of obedience to unjustifed demands by doctors were very high (with 21 out of 22 nurses obeying).
This suggests that the processes of obedience to authority that occurred in Milgram’s lab study can be generalised to other situations
Milgrams research - supporting replication
The participants believed they were contestants in a pilot episode for a new game show called La Zone Xtrême. They were paid to give (fake) electric shocks – when ordered by the presenter – to other participants, who were in fact actors, in front of a studio audience. - a documentary about reality TV, presented on French television in 2010, includes a replication of Milgram’s study.
- This replication supports Milgram’s original
conclusions about obedience to authority, and demonstrates that his findings were not just a one-off chance occurrence.
Milgrams variations - research support - Hickman - 1974
- had three confederates dress in three different out ts – jacket and tie, a milkman’s out t, and a security guard’s uniform.
- The confederates stood in the street and asked passers-by to perform tasks such as picking up litter or giving the confederate a coin for the parking meter.
- People were twice as likely to obey the assistant dressed as a security guard than the one dressed in jacket and tie.
This supports Milgram’s conclusion that a uniform conveys the authority of its wearer and is a situational factor likely to produce obedience.
Milgrams variations - lack of internal validity
Orne and hollands
- criticism of Milgram’s original study was that many of the participants worked out that the procedure was faked.
- It is even more likely that participants in Milgram’s variations realised this because of the extra manipulation. A good example is the variation where the experimenter is replaced by a ‘member of the public’ - Even Milgram recognised that this situation was so contrived that some participants may well have worked out the truth.
- a limitation of all Milgram’s studies because it is unclear whether the results are genuinely due to the operation of obedience or because the participants saw through the deception and acted accordingly.
Milgrams variations - cross culture replication - Miranda et al - 1981
- found an obedience rate of over 90% amongst Spanish students. This suggests that Milgram’s conclusions about obedience are not limited to American males, but are valid across cultures and apply to females too.
Agentic state A03 - glass and Schmitt (2001) - strength
- showed a film of milligrams study to students and asked them to identify who they felt was responsible for the harm to the learner.
The students blamed the experimenter rather than the participant. - the students also indicated that the responsibility was due to legitimate authority - experimenter was top of the hierarchy and therefore had legitimate authority.
- recognized legitimate of authority as the cause of obedience, supporting this explanation
Agentic state - A03 - limited explanation
- does not explain many of the research findings
- does not explain why some of the participants did not obey
- the Agentic shift explanation does not explain the finings from hofling
The Agentic shift explanation predicts that, as the nurses handed over responsibility to the doctor, they should have shown levels of anxiety similar to milligrams, participants as they understood their role in destructive process. - this was not the case. - this suggests that at best Agentic shift can only account for some situations of obedience
Legitimacy of authority - A03 - strength
- a useful. account of cultural differences in obedience. Many studies show that countries differ in the degree to which people are traditionally obedient to authority.
- Kilham and Mann (1974) replicated Milgram’s procedure in Australia and found that only 16% of their participants went all the way to the top of the voltage scale.
- Mantell (1971) found a very different figure for German participants - 85%.
- shows that in some cultures, authority is more likely to be accepted as legitimate and entitled to demand obedience from individuals.
- This reflects the ways that different societies are structured and how children are raised to perceive authority figures. -Such supportive findings from cross-cultural research increase the validity of the explanation.
Legitimacy of authority - strength - real life crimes of obedience
Kelman and Hamilton (1989) argue that the My Lai massacre (see Apply it box, facing page) can be understood in terms of the power hierarchy of the US Army..
Authoritarian personality A03 - research support. - Alan elms - 1966
- conducted interviews with a small sample of fully obedient participants, who scored highly on the F-scale, believing that there might be a link between obedience ang authoritarian personality.
- However, this link is merely a correlation between two measured variables.
- makes it impossible to draw the conclusion that authoritarian personality causes obedience on the basis of this result.
- Perhaps both obedience and authoritarian personality are associated with a lower level of education, for instance, and are not directly linked with each other at all (Hyman and Sheatsley 1954).
Authoritarian personality A03 - limited explanation
Any explanation of obedience in terms of individual personality will find it hard to explain obedient behaviour in the majority of a country’s population.
- For example, in pre-war Germany, millions of individuals all displayed obedient, racist and antiSemitic behaviour.
- This was despite the fact that they must have differed in their personalities in all sorts of ways. It seems extremely unlikely that they could all possess an authoritarian personality.
- This is a limitation of Adorno’s theory because it is clear that an alternative explanation is much more realistic - that social identity explains obedience. The majority of the German people identified with the anti-Semitic Nazi state, and scapegoated the ‘outgroup’ of Jews.
Authoritarian personality A03 - political bias
The F-scale measures the tendency towards an extreme form of right-wing ideology.
Christie and Jahoda (1954) argued that this is a politically biased interpretation of authoritarian personality.
They point out the reality of left-wing authoritarianism in the shape, for example, of Russian Bolshevism or Chinese Maoism. In fact, extreme right-wing and left-wing ideologies have much in common - not the least of which is that they both emphasise the importance of complete obedience to legitimate political authority.
This is a limitation of Adorno’s theory because it is net a comprehensive dispositional explanation that can account for obedience to authority across the whole political spectrum.
Resistance to conformity - research support - Allen and Levine
- found that conformity decreased when there was one dissenter in an Asch-type study.
- More importantly, this occurred even if the dissenter wore thick glasses and said he had difficulty with his vision (so he was clearly in no position to judge the length of the lines).
- This supports the view that resistance is not just motivated by following what someone else says but it enables someone to be free of the pressure from the group.
Resistance to obedience - research support - gamson et al
- found higher levels of resistance in their study than Milgram.
- This was probably because the participants in Gamson’s study were in groups (they had to produce evidence that would be used to help an oil company run a smear campaign).
- In Gamson’s study, 29 out of 33 groups of participants (88%) rebelled.
- This shows that peer support is linked to greater resistance
Locus of control A03 - research support - holland 1967
- repeated Milgram’s baseline study and measured whether participants were internals or externals.
- He found that 37% of internals did not continue to the highest shock level (i.e. they showed some resistance) whereas only 23% of externals did not continue. In other words internals showed greater resistance to authority.
- Research support of this nature increases the validity of the LOC explanation and our confidence that it can explain resistance.
