Evaluate Social Impact theory (8 marks)

Question 1

How does social impact theory have Credibility and comparison?

Answer 1

• There have been more recent additions to Social Impact Theory.
• Latané et al. (1996)developed Dynamic Social Impact Theoryto pay attention to how minorities and majorities influence each other, such as how people tend to change their views to match the group they are in but why they sometimes “stick to their guns”.

Question 1

How does social impact theory have Objections

Answer 1

• Social Impact pays a lot of attention to the characteristics of the person giving the orders but not much to the person receiving them
• For example, there may bepersonality typesthat are particularlycompliant(go along with anything) orrebellious.
• A person may be happy to go along with some sorts of orders but draw the line at others – such as orders that offend them morally or embarrass them socially.

Question 2

How does social impact theory have Objections ?

Answer 2

→ A similar problem is that Social Impact Theory treats people aspassive.
→ An example might beOskar Schindler who handed Jewish employees over to the Nazis during WWII while secretly helping many others to escape.
→ It proposes that anybody will do anything if the right amount of Social Force is brought to bear on them. However, people sometimes obey orders while at the same time subverting them.

Question 3

How does social impact theory have differences?

Answer 3

→ Milgram Agency Theory is verysimplisticcompared to Social Impact Theory.
→ Milgram suggests we have evolved to go into an obedient mental state around anyone we recognise as an authority. There’s not much evidence for this in general.
→ Social Impact Theory suggests many features of Agency Theory are true – that the strength (S) of the authority figure is an important predictor of how obedient someone will be – but there are othersituational factorsas well, like the numbers of people involved (N) and the immediacy (I) of the orders.

Question 4

How does social impact theory have differences?

Answer 4

→ Agency Theory explains some things better than Social Impact Theory.
→ For example, inVariation #10, obedience was lower in a run-down office compared to Yale University. Milgram explains this through theprestigeof the setting adding to the authority figure’s status, but this is hard for Latané to give a mathematical value to. Similarly, Milgram has an explanation for the shaking and weeping his participants engaged in –moral strain.
→ There’s no discussion of moral strain in Social Impact Theory, which views people as either obeying or disobeying and nothing in between.

Question 5

How does social impact theory have Applications and Implications to society?

Answer 5

→ The idea of a mathematical formula to calculate Social Impact is veryuseful.
→ Latané believes that, if you know the number (N) of people involved and the immediacy (I) of the order and the strength (S) of the authority figure, you can calculate exactly how likely someone is to obey (i) using the formulai=f(SIN).
→ This means you canpredictwhether laws will be followed, whether riots will break out and whether 9B will do their homework.