CHAPTER 1: SOCIAL INFLUENCE

Question 1

What is the definition of conformity?

Answer 1

A change in a person’s behaviour or

opinions as a result of real or imagined pressure from a person or group of people.

Question 2

What is the definition of internalisation?

Answer 2

A deep type of conformity where we
take on the majority view because we accept it as correct. It leads to a far-reaching and permanent change in behaviour, even when the group is absent.

Question 3

What is the definition of identification?

Answer 3

A moderate type of conformity where
we act in the same way with the group because we value it and want to be part of it. But we don’t necessarily agree with everything the majority believes.

Question 4

What is the definition of compliance?

Answer 4

A superficial and temporary type of
conformity where we outwardly go along with the majority view, but privately disagree with it. The change in our behaviour only lasts as long as the group is monitoring us.

Question 5

What is the definition of informational social influence (ISI)?

Answer 5

An explanation of conformity that says we agree with the opinion of the majority because we believe it is correct. We accept it because we want to be correct as well. This may lead to internalisation.

Question 6

What is the definition of normative social influence (NSI)?

Answer 6

An explanation of conformity that says we agree with the opinion of the majority because we want to be accepted, gain social approval and be liked. This may lead to compliance.

Question 7

What is research support for ISI?

Answer 7

Lucas et al. (2006) asked students to give answers to mathematical problems that were difficult or easy. There was greater conformity to incorrect answers when they were difficult rather than when they were easier ones. This was most true for students who rated their mathematical ability as poor. The study shows that people conform in situations where they feel they don’t know the answer, which is exactly the outcome predicted by the ISI explanation. We look to other people and assume they know better than us and must be right.

Question 8

What is research support for NSI?

Answer 8

Asch (1951) found that many of
his participants went along with a
clearly wrong answer just because
other people did. (36.8% conformed to wrong answer). So he asked them why they did this. Some of the participants said they felt self-conscious giving the correct answer and they were afraid of disapproval. When Asch repeated his study but asked participants to write
down their answers instead of saying
them out loud, conformity rates fell
to 12.5%.

Question 9

What are individual differences in NSI?

Answer 9

People who are less concerned with being liked are less affected by NSI than those who care more about being liked. Such people are described as Affiliators, people who have a greater need for ‘affiliation’ - a need for being in a relationship with others. For example, McGhee and Teevan (1967) found that students high in need of affiliation were more likely to conform. This shows that the desire to be liked underlies conformity for some people more than others. Therefore there are individual differences in the way people
respond.

Question 10

What is individual differences in ISI?

Answer 10

Asch (1955) found that students were
less conformist (28%) than other
participants (37%). Perrin and
Spencer (1980) conducted a study
involving science and engineering
students and found very little
conformity.

Question 11

What is Asch’s procedure?

Answer 11

• Asch (1951, 1955) tested conformity by showing participants two large white cards at a time. On one card was a standard line and on the other card there were three comparison lines.
• One of the three lines was the same length as the standard and the other two were always clearly wrong. The participant was asked which of the three lines matched the standard.
• The participants in this study were 50 American male undergraduates, a voluntary sample.
• Each naive participant was tested individually with a group of between six and eight confederates. The naive participant was not aware that the other were confederates.
• On the first few trials all the confederates gave the right answers but then they started making errors. All the confederates were instructed to give the same wrong answer.
• Altogether each participant took part in 18 trials and on 12 ‘critical trials’ the confederates gave the wrong answer. A trial was one occasion identifying the length of a standard line.

Question 12

What were the findings of Asch?

Answer 12

• The naive participant gave a wrong answer 36.8% of the time.
• Overall 25% of the participants did not conform on any trials, which means that 75% conformed at least once.
• When participants were interviewed afterwards most said they conformed to avoid rejection (normative social influence)

Question 13

Evaluate three GRAVER points for Asch

Answer 13

• Asch used a biased sample of 50 male college students. Therefore, we cannot generalise the results to other populations, for example female students, and we are unable to conclude if female students would have conformed in a similar way to male students. As a result Asch’s sample lacks population validity and further research is required to determine whether males and females conform differently.
• It could be argued that Asch’s experiment has low levels of ecological validity. Asch’s test of conformity, a line judgement task, is an artificial task, which does not reflect conformity in everyday life. Consequently, we are unable to generalise the results of Asch to other real life situations, such as why people may start smoking or drinking around friends, and therefore these results are limited in their application to everyday life.
• Asch broke several ethical guidelines, including: deception and protection from harm. Asch deliberately deceived his participants, saying that they were taking part in a vision test and not an experiment on conformity. Although it is seen as unethical to deceive participants, Asch’s experiment required deception in order to achieve valid results. If the participants were aware of the true aim they would have displayed demand characteristics and acted differently. In addition, Asch’s participants were not protected from psychological harm and many of the participants reporting feeling stressed when they disagreed with the majority. However, Asch interviewed all of his participants following the experiment to overcome this issue.

Question 14

What were Perrin and Spencer’s research?

Answer 14

Perrin and Spencer (1980) repeated Ash’s original study with engineering
students in the UK. 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 and therefore were less conformist. But it is also 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. But society has changed a great deal since then, and people are possibly less conformist today.

Question 15

How does group size affect conformity?

Answer 15

Asch increased the size of the group by adding more confederates, thus increasing the size of the majority. Conformity increased with group size, but only up to a point, levelling off when the majority was greater than three.

Question 16

How does unanimity affect conformity?

Answer 16

The extent to which all the members
of a group agree. In Asch’s studies, the majority was unanimous when all the confederates selected the same comparison line. This produced the greatest degree of conformity in the naïve participants.

Question 17

How does task difficulty affect conformity?

Answer 17

Asch’s line-judging task is more difficult when it becomes harder to work out the correct answer. Conformity increases because naive participants assume that the majority is more likely to be right.

Question 18

What was Zimbardo’s procedure?

Answer 18

Zimbardo set up a mock prison in the basement of the psychology department at Stanford University. They advertised for students willing to volunteer and selected those who were deemed ‘emotionally stable’ after extensive psychological testing. The students were randomly assigned the roles of guards or prisoners. To heighten the realism of the study, the ‘prisoners’ were arrested in their homes by the local police and were then delivered to the ‘prison’. They were blindfolded, strip-searched,
deloused and issued a uniform and number.

The social roles of the prisoners and the guards were strictly divided. The prisoners’ daily routines were heavily regulated. There were 16 rules they had to follow, which were enforced by the guards who worked in shifts, three at a time.

The prisoners’ names were never used, only their numbers. The guards, to underline their role, had their own uniform, complete with wooden club, handcuffs, keys and mirror shades. They were told they had complete power over the prisoners, for instance even deciding when they could go to the toilet.

Question 19

What were Zimbardo’s findings?

Answer 19

After a slow start to the simulation, the guards took up their roles with enthusiasm. Their behaviour became a threat to the prisoners’ psychological and physical health, and the study was stopped after six days instead of the intended 14.

Within two days, the prisoners rebelled against their harsh treatment by the quards. They ripped their uniforms, and shouted and swore at the guards, who retaliated with fire extinguishers. The guards employed ‘divide-and-rule’ tactics by playing the prisoners off against each other.

They harassed the prisoners constantly, to remind them they were being monitored all the time. For example, they conducted frequent headcounts, sometimes in the middle of the night, when the prisoners would stand in line and call out their numbers. The guards highlighted the differences in social roles by creating plenty of opportunities to enforce the rules and punish even the smallest misdemeanour.

After their rebellion was put down, the prisoners became subdued, depressed and anxious. One prisoner was released on the first day because he showed symptoms of psychological disturbance. Two more were released on the fourth day. One prisoner went on a hunger strike. The guards attempted to force-feed him and then punished him by
putting him in ‘the hole’, a tiny dark closet. Instead of being considered a hero, he was shunned by the other prisoners. The guards identified more and more closely with their role. Their behaviour became more brutal and aggressive, with some of them appearing to enjoy the power they had over the prisoners.

Question 20

What are Zimbardo’s conclusions?

Answer 20

The simulation revealed the power of the situation to influence people’s behaviour. Guards, prisoners and researchers all conformed to their roles within the prison. These roles were very easily taken on by the participants - even volunteers who came in to perform certain functions (such as the prison chaplain) found themselves behaving as if they were in a prison rather than in a psychological study.

Question 21

Evaluate Zimbardo’s study using GRAVER

Answer 21

• Ethical issues arose as Zimbardo took the role of a prison superintendent and told one of the prisoner’s that he could not leave so there was no right to withdraw
• Reliability issues as the BBC prison study replicated the experiment and found different results as the guards did not harass or insult the prisoners

Question 22

What was Milgram’s procedure?

Answer 22

Milgram recruited 40 male participants through newspaper adverts and flyers in the post. The ad said he was looking for participants for a study about memory. The participants recruited were aged between 20 and 50 years, and their jobs ranged from unskilled to professional. They were offered $4.50 to take part.

When participants arrived at Milgram’s lab they were paid the money at the outset and there was a rigged draw for their role. A confederate, always ended up as the learner’ while the true participant was the ‘teacher’. There was also an “experimenter’ dressed in a lab coat, played by an actor. Participants were told they could leave the study at any time.

The learner was strapped in a chair in another room and wired with electrodes. The teacher was required to qive the learner an increasingly severe electric shock each time the learner made a mistake on a learninq task (the task involved learning word pairs). The shocks were demonstrated to the teacher. Thereafter the shocks were not real.

The shock level started at 15 (labelled ‘slight shock’ on the shock machine) and rose through 30 levels to 450 volts (labelled ‘danger - severe shock”). When the teacher qot to 300 volts (‘intense shock”) the learner pounded on the wall and then gave no response to the next question. After the 315-volt shock the learner pounded on the wall again but after that there was no further response from the learner.

When the teacher turned to the experimenter for guidance, the experimenter gave a standard
instruction: ‘An absence of response should be treated as a wrong answer’. If the teacher felt unsure about continuing, the experimenter used a sequence of four standard ‘prods’, which were repeated if necessary:

Prod 1 - ‘Please continue’ or ‘Please go on.’
Prod 2 - ‘The experiment requires that you continue
Prod 3 - ‘It is absolutely essential that you continue.’
Prod 4 - ‘You have no other choice, you must go on.’

Question 23

What were Milgram’s findings?

Answer 23

No participants stopped below 300 volts, 12.5% (five participants) stopped at 300 volts (‘intense shock’), 65% continued to the highest level of 450 volts. Qualitative data were also collected, such as observations that the participants showed signs of extreme tension; many of them were seen to ‘sweat, tremble, stutter, bite their lips, groan and dig their fingernails into their hands’ Three even had ‘full-blown uncontrollable seizures’

Prior to the study Milgram asked 14 psychology students to predict the participants’ behaviour. The students estimated that no more than 3% of the participants would continue to 450 volts. This shows that the findings were not expected.

All participants were debriefed, and assured that their behaviour was entirely normal. They were also sent a follow-up questionnaire; 84% reported that they felt glad to have participated.

Question 24

Evaluate Milgram using GRAVER

Answer 24

Milgram’s study has been heavily criticised for breaking numerous ethical guidelines, including: deception, right to withdraw and protection from harm.

Milgram’s study has been criticised for lacking ecological validity. Milgram tested obedience in a laboratory, which is very different to real-life situations of obedience, where people are often asked to follow more subtle instructions, rather than administering electric shocks. As a result we are unable to generalise his findings to real life situations of obedience and cannot conclude that people would obey less severe instructions in the same way.

Question 25

How does proximity affect obedience in Milgram’s variation?

Answer 25

In the proximity variation, the teacher and learner were in same room. In this condition, the obedience rate dropped from the baseline 65% to 40%. If the teacher forced the learner’s hand onto a shock plate it would drop to 30%. Over the telephone, it would drop 20.5%.

Question 26

How does location affect obedience in Milgram’s variation?

Answer 26

In another kind of variation Milgram changed the location of the obedience study. He conducted a variation of the study in a run-down building rather than the prestigious university setting where it was originally conducted (Yale University). In such a situation the experimenter had less authority. Obedience fell to 47.5%, less than the original 65% in the original baseline study.

Question 27

How does uniform affect obedience in Milgram’s variation?

Answer 27

In the original baseline study, the experimenter wore a grey lab coat as a symbol of his authority (a kind of uniform). Milgram carried out a variation in which the experimenter was called away because of an inconvenient telephone call right at the start of the procedure. The role of the experimenter was taken over by an ‘ordinary member of the public’ (played by a confederate) in everyday clothes rather than a lab coat. The obedience rate dropped to 20%, the lowest of these variations.

Question 28

What is the agentic state?

Answer 28

A mental state where we feel no personal responsibility for our behaviour because we believe ourselves to be acting for an authority figure, i.e. as their agent. This frees us from the demands of our consciences and allows us to obey even a destructive authority figure.

Question 29

What is the autonomous state?

Answer 29

A person in an autonomous state is free to behave according to their own principles and therefore feels a sense of responsibility for their own actions.

Question 30

What is legitimacy of authority?

Answer 30

An explanation for obedience which suggests that we are more likely to obey people who we perceive to have authority over us. This authority is justified by the individual’s position of power within a social hierarchy.

Question 31

What is an authoritarian personality?

Answer 31

A type of personality that Adorno argued was especially susceptible to obeying people in authority. Such individuals are also thought to be submissive to those of higher status and dismissive of inferiors. Adorno et al (1950) created the F-scale and found that there was a positive correlation between authoritarian and prejudice.

Question 32

What is locus of control?

Answer 32

Refers to the sense we each have about what directs events in our lives. Internals believe they are mostly responsible for what happens to them (internal locus of control). Externals believe it is mainly a matter of luck or other outside forces (external locus of control).

Question 33

What is minority influence?

Answer 33

A form of social influence in which a minority of people (sometimes just one person) persuade others to adopt their beliefs, attitudes or behaviours. Leads to internalisation or conversion, in which private attitudes are changed as well as public behaviours.

Question 34

What is consistency in minority influence?

Answer 34

Minority influence is most effective if
the minority keeps the same beliefs, both over time and between all the individuals that form the minority. It’s effective because it draws attention to the minority view.

Question 35

What is commitment in minority influence?

Answer 35

Minority influence is more powerful if
the minority demonstrates dedication to their position, for example, by making personal sacrifices. This is effective because it shows the minority is not acting out of self-interest.

Question 36

What is flexibility in minority influence?

Answer 36

Relentless consistency could be counter-productive if it is seen by the majority as unbending and unreasonable. Therefore minority influence is more effective if the minority show flexibility by accepting the possibility of compromise.

Question 37

What was Moscovici’s study?

Answer 37

Moscovici et al. (1969) demonstrated minority influence in a study where a group of six people was asked to view a set of 36 blue-coloured slides that varied in intensity and then state whether the slides were blue or green. In each group there were two confederates who consistently said the slides were green on two-thirds of the trials. The participants gave the same wrong answer on 8.42% of trials, 32% gave the same answer as the minority on at least one trial.

A second group of participants was exposed to an inconsistent minority and agreement fell to 1.25%. For a third control group there were no confederates and all participants had to do was identify the colour of each slide. They got this wrong on just 0.25% of the trials.

Question 38

Evaluate Moscovici using GRAVER?

Answer 38

Moscovici used a bias sample of 172 female participants from America. As a result, we are unable to generalise the results to other populations, for example male participants, and we cannot conclude that male participants would respond to minority influence in the same way. Furthermore, research often suggests that females are more likely to conform and therefore further research is required to determine the effect of minority influence on male participants.

Moscovici has also been criticised for deceiving his participants, as participants were told that they were taking part in a colour perception test. This also means that Moscovici did not gain fully informed consent. Although it is seen as unethical to deceive participants, Moscovici’s experiment required deception in order to achieve valid results. If the participants were aware of the true aim, they might have displayed demand characteristics and acted differently

Question 39

What is the role of minorities in social change?

Answer 39

(1) Drawing attention through social proof - The civil rights marches of this period drew attention to the situation by providing social proof of the problem.
(2) Consistency - There were many marches and many people taking part. Even though they were a minority of the American population, the civil rights activists displayed consistency of message and intent.
(3) Deeper processing of the issue - This attention meant that many people who had simply accepted the status quo began to think about the unjustness of it.
(4) The augmentation principle - There were a number of incidents where individuals risked their lives. For example the “freedom riders’ were mixed racial groups who got on buses in the south to challenge the fact that black people still had to sit separately on buses. Many freedom riders were beaten and there were incidents of mob violence.
(5) The snowball effect - Civil rights activists such as Martin Luther King continued to press for changes that gradually got the attention of the US government. In 1964 the Us Civil Rights Act was passed, which prohibited discrimination. This represented a change from minority to majority support for civil rights.
(6) Social cryptomnesia (people have a memory that change has occurred but don’t remember how it happened) - There is no doubt that social change did come about and the south is quite a different place now but some people have no memory of the events above that led to that change.