Approaches - AO3

Question 1

Social support - Conformity - evaluation

Answer 1

A strength = emprical evidencee
-Allen and Levine (1971) found that conformity decreased when dissenter was added in a replication of Aschs experiment. More importantly this even occured when the dissenter wore thick glasses and said he had trouble with his eyesight. Therefore this suggests that the break in unanimity frees the individual from group pressure. Demonstrating how social support can reduce conformity and increase the validity of the explanation.

Question 2

Social support - obedience - evaluation

Answer 2

A strength = empirical evidence
- Gamson et al (1982) found higher levels of resistance that Milgrim when they instructed ppts to provide help to an oil companyt o find evidence by running a ‘smear’ campaign. 88% of ppts rebelled compared to 35% in Milgrims exxperiment who supassed 300v. The findings were likely to bee because they had social support. The first disobedient ppt would have acted as a role model for the others to defy orders. This provides evidence that social support is linked to greater resistance of obedience increasing the validity of the explanation

Question 3

LoC - evaluation - obedience

Answer 3

A strength = emprical evidence
- Holland (1967) replicated milgrims study and measured whether ppts were ‘internals’ or ‘externals’. He found that 37% of internals didn’t continue whereas 23% of externals did. Demonstrating that internals showed greater resistance to authority and therefore there are dispositional (internal characteristics) factors that affect obedience. Its worth noting that the results are correlational and therefore it doesn’t establish causation. However the evidence does increase the validity of the LoC explanation of resistance to social influence

Question 4

LoC - evaluation - limitation

Answer 4

A limitation = contradictory research
- Twenge et al (2004) analysed data from LoC studies between 1960 - 2002. The data showed that over this time span people have become more resistant to obedience but also more external. If resistance was associated with internal LoC then they would have expected peop;e to become more internal but this is the opposite to what actually happened. This challenges the relationship between these variables. However the results between these variables may e explained by a changing society where many things are out of control and this may have been a confounding variable