conformity: types and explanations Flashcards
AO1: type- compliance
conforming publicly but disagreeing privately
AO1: type- identification
act the same as the group because we share their values and want to be accepted. The change of belief or behaviour is often only temporary
AO1: type- internalisation
a deep type of conformity where a person conforms publicly and privately because they have internalised and accepted the views of the group
AO1: explanations- normative social influence
occurs when we wish to be liked by the majority groups, so we go along with them even though we may not agree with them
linked to compliance
AO1: explanation- informational social influence
occurs when we look to the majority group for information as we are unsure about the way in which to behave
linked to internalisation
AO3: strength- research support for NSI (Asch’s study)
however, artificial task so low pop validity
P: Asch’s study provides research support for NSI
E: found that many participants went along with the wrong answers given by the other group members
E: when asked by Asch in post experiment interviews why they did this, and the participants said they changed their answers to avoid disapproval from the rest of the group, clearly shows compliance occurred as the participants conformed in order to ‘fit in’
L: provides support for the idea of NSI
HOWEVER, Asch’s study is low in ecological validity as the line judgement task is an artificial task. This doesn’t reflect conformity in everyday life. Therefore unable to generalise the results to other real life situations
AO3: Strength- research support for ISI
however, only students so low pop validity
P: research support for ISI
E: Lucas et al did an experiment with students and presented them with difficult maths problems
E: found they conformed more to an incorrect answer as the maths problem was tricky
L: provides support for ISI
HOWEVER, was only done on students, which is a small age range, meaning the findings can only be generalised to students and not the target population. Low population validity
AO3: limitation- individual
differences
P: individual differences, this means that the processes of NSI and ISI many not effect everyones behaviour in the same way
E: researchers conducted an Asch-style experiment, but this time using engineering students in the UK.
E: only one person conformed out of 400 trials. Could be due to the fact the students felt more confident in their ability to judge the line length due to their experience in engineering and felt less pressure to conform
L: shows that individual differences need to be considered when it comes to explaining why people conform
AO3: strength- real life application for NSI
P: real life applications which demonstrate that NSI occurs outside of the lab
E: researcher gathered data from many hotels over a where guests were randomly allocated to control room (door hanger stating the benefits of reusing towels) or experimental room (door hanger had addition info, that 75% of guests chose to reuse their towels each day)
E: results showed that in comparison to control room, the experimental conditions guests reduced their needs for fresh towels by 25%.
L: shows NSI happens in real life situations
