Explanations of resistance to social influence including social support and locus of control Flashcards
What is internal locus of control
Believes that their success is based on their own efforts and there is no luck or fate involved, no outsider factors
What is external locus of control
Believes that there are some outsider factors that affect your actions and luck and fate are real things that affect our decisions
What is agentic state?
A mindset where someone will follow orders from an authority figure even if they conflict their own sense of right and wrong.
Why are people with high internal locus of control more likely to resist social influence
Because they tend to be more likely to be confident and therefore less likely to need approval from others and wont change their behaviour in a group
Which locus of control will conform to agentic state
External locus of control because they are more likely to be able to pass responsibility for something that they feel uncomfortable with, onto someone else
What is some evidence support the theory of locus of control as an explanation for why people resist
Elms and Milgram (1974) investigated the background of the disobedient participants from Milgram’s first four obedience experiments - the more disobedient participants had a high internal locus of control.
Oliner and Oliner (1988) interviewed two groups who lived through the holocaust. They compared 406 people who had rescued Jews with 126 who had not done so. They found the rescuers were more likely to have high scores demonstrating high locus of control.
What is some evidence that disapproves the theory of locus of control as an explanation for why people resist
WIlliams and Warchal (1981) studied 30 university students who were given a range of conformity tasks based on Asch’s procedure. Each student was also assessed using Rotter’s locus of control scale but they were less assertive.
Correlational, no cause and effect. Cannot establish they are related.
