Conformity

Question 1

Define Social influence

Answer 1

Occurs when ones emotions, opinions and behaviours are affected by others

Question 2

Define conformity

Answer 2

When a person changes their behaviours or opinions as a result of real or imagined pressure from another person or group of people

Question 3

What are the 3 types of conformity?

Answer 3

• Compliance
• Identification
• Internalisation

Question 4

What is compliance?

Answer 4

Superficial agreement with the group

Going along with other people’s opinions in public but holding other views privately (not necessarily to please people just because)

e.g a person may laugh at a joke because others are

Question 5

What is identification?

Answer 5

Conforming to a group because we value it
- Prepared to change views to be a part of it even if we internally disagree

e.g A new football team to support every time you move town

Question 6

What is internalisation?

Answer 6

Conforming to a group because you accept its norms
- You agree privately & or publicly, when exposed to the views of other members of a group, individuals are encouraged to engage in a validation process, examining their own beliefs to see if they or others are right.

e.g a person may become vegetarian because they accept it.

Question 7

Why do people conform?

Answer 7

Morton Deutsch & Harold Gerard developed a two-process theory, arguing that there are two main reasons people conform.

They are based on two central needs; the need to be right (ISI), and the need to be liked (NSI)

Question 8

What is informational social influence (ISI) and what type of process is it?

Answer 8

• Agreeing with the majority view/behaviour because we believe they know better or are more likely to be right

A cognitive process- to do with what you think

Question 9

When is informational social influence (ISI) most likely to occur?

Answer 9

Most likely to occur in situations that are new to a person (so you dont know what is right/ wrong)

Also typical in a crisis where decisions need to be made quickly or when one person/group is regarded as the expert

Question 10

What is normative social influence (NSI) and what type of process is it?

Answer 10

Agreeing with the majority because we want to be liked

To do with norm i.e what is normal behaviour?

An emotional process- people don’t want to appear foolish

Question 11

When is normative social influence (NSI) most likely to occur?

Answer 11

Most likely to occur in situation with strangers where you may feel concerned about rejection.

May also occur with people you know because we are concerned with social approval of our friends

Question 12

What was Asch’s conformity study?

Answer 12

Asch asked student volunteers to take part in a visual discrimination task, although, unbeknown to these volunteers, all but one of the participants were really confederates (i.e., colleagues) of the investigator. The real purpose of the study was to see how the lone ‘real’ participant would react to the behaviour of the confederates.

Procedure:
In total, 123 male US undergraduates were tested. Participants were seated around a table and asked to look at three lines of different lengths. They took turns to call out which of the three lines they thought was the same length as a ‘standard’ line with the real participant always answering second to last.

Although there was always a fairly obvious solution to this task, on 12 of the 18 trials (i.e. the critical trials) the confederates were instructed to give the same incorrect answer. Asch was interested in whether the ‘real’ participants would stick to what to what they believed to be right, or cave into the pressure of the majority and go along with its decision.

Question 13

What were the findings from Asch’s conformity study?

Answer 13

• The naïve participant gave the wrong answer 36.8% of the time.
• 75% conformed to at least one wrong answer, and 25% never conformed.
• 50% conformed on six or more of the 12 critical trials.
• 5% conformed on all 12 of the critical trials.
• The control group had an error rate of 0.04% (3 mistakes out of 720 trials), which shows how obvious the correct answers were.

Question 14

Post-experiment interviews were conducted from Asch’s study & and found three reasons for conformity, what were they?

Answer 14

The majority of participants conformed publicly to avoid disap-proval from other group members but continued privately to trust their own perceptions and judgements.

• Some participants believed that their perception must actually be wrong and so conformed.
• Some participants had doubts concerning the accuracy of their judgements

Question 15

What were the conclusions of Asch’s study?

Answer 15

Conclusion:
Judgements of individuals are affected by majority opinions, even when the majority are obviously wrong.

There are big individual differences in the amount to which people are affected by majority influence.

As most conformed publicly, but not privately, it suggests that they were motivated by normative social influence ( conformity to avoid rejection)

Question 16

What are the three variables that Asch found affect conformity?

Answer 16

Group Size
Unanimity of the majority
The difficulty of the task

Question 17

How was group size a variable affecting conformity?

Answer 17

Asch found very little conformity when the majority consisted of only one or two confederates

Further increases in the size of the majority is important but onlu up to a point

Question 18

How was unanimity of the majority a variable affecting conformity?

Answer 18

Asch wanted to know if the prescence of another, non-conforming person would affect the naive participants conformity.

To test this, intorduced a new confederate who disagreed with the others, sometimes new confederate gave correct answer & sometimes gave the wrong one

Question 19

What did Asch find in the unanimity of the majority study?

Answer 19

Found that presence of the dissenting confederate giving the correct answer meant that conformity was reduced to 5% & 9% when dissesnting confederate gave a different wrong answer

Dissenter enabled participant to act more independently.

Question 20

How did the difficulty of the task affect conformity rates?

Answer 20

• In one variation- Asch made differences beween the line lengths much samller (so that the ‘correct’ answer was less obvious & task much more difficult)
• Under these circumstances level of conformity increased

Question 21

How did Lucas et al investigate the difficulty of the task within conformity further?

Answer 21

Found that influence of the task is moderated by the self efficacy (what they believe they can do/confidence)

When exposed to maths problems in an Asch type task, high self efficacy participants (ppts who were confident in their own abilities) remained more independant than low self efficacy participants

Question 22

What did Lucas’s research of the difficulty of the task show?

Answer 22

Situational differences (task difficulty) & Individual differences (self-efficacy) are both important in determining conformity

Question 23

What was the procedure for Zimbardos study?

Answer 23

Procedure:
* A mock prison was set up in the basement of the Psychology department at Stanford University in California.
* Male student volunteers were psychologically and physically screened and the 24 most stable of these were randomly assigned to play the role of ‘prisoner’ or ‘guard’
* The prisoners were unexpectedly arrested at home and on entry to the ‘prison’ they were put through a delousing procedure, given a prison uniform and assigned an ID number.
* The guards referred to the prisoners only by these numbers throughout the study
* Prisoners were allowed certain rights including, three meals and three supervised toilet trips a day and two visits per week
* Participants allocated the role of the guard were given uniforms, clubs, whistles and wore reflective sunglasses (to prevent eye contact and from showing emotion)
* Zimbardo himself took the role of the Prison Superintendent & the study was planned to last two weeks

Question 24

What were the findings of Zimbardo?

Answer 24

• Over the first few days of the study the guards grew increasingly tyrannical and abusive to-wards the prisoners
• They woke prisoners in the night and forced them to clean the toiletd with their bare hands and made them carry out other degrading activities.
• The participants appeared at times to forget that this was only a psychological study and that they were merely acting. Even when they were unaware of being watched, they still conformed to their role of prisoner or guard.
• When one prisoner had had enough he asked for ‘parole’ rather than asking to withdraw from the study
• Five prisoners had to be released early because of their extreme reactions (e.g crying, rage and acute anxiety) – symptoms that had started to appear just after two days
• The study was finally terminated and lasted only 6 days following the intervention of post-graduate student Christina Maslach (later to become Zimbardo’s wife) who reminded the researchers that this was a psychological study and, as such did not justify the abuse being meted out to the participants.

The study demonstrated that both guards and prisoners conformed to their social roles the guards became increasingly cruel and sadistic, and the prisoners became increasingly passive and accepting of their plight.

Question 25

What are some limitations of Zimbardo’s study?

Answer 25

ethical issues: lack of informed consent, whether or not the consent gained was sufficiently
informed; deception; lack of protection from psychological harm – participants soon
became distressed; whether or not the distress should have been anticipated; right to
withdraw was initially declined

• Zimbardo playing a ‘dual-role’/participant observer. Zimbardo’s own behaviour affected
  the way in which events unfolded, thus the validity of the findings could be questioned
• methodological issues: sample bias; demand characteristics/lack of internal validity; lack of
  ecological validity/mundane realism and their implications for the findings
• lack of supporting evidence/exact replication
• over exaggeration of findings: only a third of participants conformed to roles

Question 26

What was the other research that the BBC carried out?

Answer 26

Like the SPE the BBC study randomly assigned men to the role of prisoner or guard & examinned behaviour within a specially created ‘prison’

15 males divided into 5 groups of 3 who were closely matched as possible on key personality variables.
From each group of 3 one chosen to be a guard & other 2 chosen to be prisoners

Study was run for 8 days

Question 27

What did the BBC find when conducting their research?

Answer 27

Ppts did not conform automatically to their assigned role as had happened in the SPE.

Over course of the study, prisoners increasingly identified as a group & worked collectively to challange authority of gaurds & establish a more egalitarian set of social relations within the prison

Question 28

Define ‘obedience’

Answer 28

Obedience means to comply with the demands of someone you see as an authority figure.

Question 29

Define ‘dispositional’

Answer 29

Explanations of behaviours such as obedience emphasise them being caused by an individuals own personal characteristics rather than situational influences within the environment.

Question 30

What is the agentic shift?

Answer 30

• When orders come from a figure of authority, we can easily deny personal responsibility because it is assumed that they will take ultimate responsibility.
• When this happens we become ‘agents’ of an external authority

The agentic shift is when the fully obedient person undergoes a psychological ajustment or ‘shift’ and they see themselves as an agent of external authority (authority of the authority figure)

Question 31

What 2 factors did Milgram claim that obedience occurs to?

Answer 31

The external authority: Authority of the authority figure

The internal authority: Authority of our own conscious

Question 32

What is the agentic state?

(an explanation for obedience)

Answer 32

Milgrams interests were sparked by the trials of Nazis who had worked in the death camps: their defence was that they had simply been obeying orders.

This led Milgram to look at Agentic state as an explanation of obedience i.e an individual carrying out the orders from an authothority figure, acting as thier agent (the shift is from autonomy to agency)

Question 33

What is an autonomous state?

Answer 33

Opposite of agentic state - the person has autonomy over their actions and can act accoring to their own principles.

Question 34

Why do people adopt an agentic state?

Answer 34

-The need to maintain a positive self-image

• Actions performed under the agentic state are, form the participants perspective, virtually guilt-free, however inhumane they might be

Question 35

What is destructive authority and destructive obedience?

Answer 35

Destructive authority: When power is used for destructive purposes

Destructive obedience: When obedience is used to harm others

Question 36

Evaluate legitimacy of authority

Answer 36

Legitimacy of authority is supported by cultural differences

e.g. in countries where obedience & deference to authority are less valued (such as australia) obedience rates are much lower than in countries that value legitimate authority figures (such as germany)

Question 37

What is the authoritarian personality?