Explanations for Resistance to Social Influence Flashcards
What is resistance to social influence?
Refers to resisting pressures to conform (non- conformity) and reciting pressures to obey (disobedience).
What is anti- conformity?
When the individual acts in opposition to group norms.
Behaviour is group dependent and individuals actions are determined by the group as individual does opposite of group.
What are the two explanations of resistance to social influence?
Dispositional - Locus of control
Situational - Social support
What is social support?
- Can increase an individual’s confidence that their position/ viewpoint is correct.
- Presents an alternative way to respond to a situation.
- E.g. being exposed to a disobedient role model makes non- conformity or disobedience a possible alternative.
What is locus of control?
- Dispositional explanation that refers to personal factors.
- Refers individual differences between peoples beliefs and expectations about what controls events in their lives.
- Relates to a persons perception of the extent of personal control they have over their own behaviour.
What is an internal locus of control?
Believes what happens to them in their life is a consequence of internal factors such as their own ability and effort to make personal decisions, therefore they believe that they have control over their life.
What is an external locus of control?
- Believes that what happens to them is controlled by external factors such as fate.
- Things just happen and are largely uncontrollable.
- These people take less responsibility for their actions and have a passive and fatalistic attitude.
What is some support for social support in terms of Asch: presence of a dissenter?
- Asch found that if there was a dissenter amongst confederates than participants were more likely to give the correct answer, therefore resisting the pressure to conform.
- Conformity levels dropped from 37% of critical trials to 5.5% when the participants received social support.
- When unanimity is broken by one person giving a different answer to the majority, then others are more likely to feel confident enough to give the correct answer.
What is some support regarding Allen and Levine and the timing of social support?
- two conditions.
- condition 1 - confederate who answered first gave the correct answer while other 3 confederates gave the incorrect same answer. Real participant answered last.
- condition 2 - confederate giving correct response answer second from last following the other 3 confederate who had given the same incorrect answer.
- When an individual gives a correct answer before others it confirms their own judgement.
- Resistance is helped when social support is received early.
What is the support for locus of control regarding Oliner and Oliner?
- Real world application.
- Interviewed two groups of non- jewish people that had lived through the holocaust in nazi Germany.
- Compared 406 people who had protected and rescued jews to 126 who’s had not.
- Found rescuers scored higher on measures of responsibility and had scores indicating an internal locus of control.
Supports ILC
What is the criticism of locus of control by Williams and Warchal?
- Studied 30 uni students who were given a range of conformity tasks based on Asch.
- Each student assessed using Rotter’s LC.
- Those who conformed the most were significantly less assertive but did not score differently on the LC scale.
- Suggests those who conformed easily have an external locus of control and questions link between locus of control and resistance to social influence.
What conclusions can be drawn altogether from the research?
Most studies are correlational so hard to establish cause and affect
