Lecture 7 Flashcards
Define conformity
Changing our opinions and behaviour so that it’s consistent with the group’s norms.
Describe Asch’s study about majority influence
The control group (7 participants) gave answers individually and aloud. The unanimous group (1 participant, 6 confederates) answered correctly 12 out 18 times and all the confederates answered the same. The participant in the unanimous group gave significantly more incorrect answers compared to the control. The questions they answered wrong were the same as the confederates.
Other participants then repeated the same study. The confederates unanimously answered 6 questions wrong whereas one confederate answered them correctly. The participant still didn’t keep with the majority and they answered correctly. Therefore it needs to be unanimous.
This was then repeated but the one confederate answered a different incorrect answer. The participant answered incorrectly more but still no where near as much as the unanimous group.
The larger the group the stronger the influence, however, this plateaus.
What are the two types of majority influence?
Which one is more powerful?
Informational influence: A change of belief when someone privately accepts the position of others.
Normative influence: A superficial change in behaviour without a corresponding change of opinion produced by ‘group pressure’.
Informational is more powerful.
Define inter-individual
Define intra-individual
Between different people
Within one person
Discuss Moscovici’s study about minority influence
The control consisted of all participants saying their answer out loud and individually. The consistent minority group consisted of 4 participants and 2 confederates who repeatedly got it wrong. The inconsistent minority group was the same but their answers were sometimes write and sometimes wrong. The participants answered incorrectly 10% of the time in the consistent minority compared to less than 1% in the other two conditions.
They then introduced a pattern. They were still consistently wrong but there was a pattern in the answers (the darker slides were greeny blue and lighter slides were green). The other group had no pattern. The participants were incorrect 25% of the time in the pattern condition. Pattern influences more than consistency in minority influence.
List 4 factors that influence minority influence
Personal benefit, uncertainty, likeability and the snowball effect, whereas majority influence is influenced by imagined group pressure.
Is minority influence normative?
What type of culture has higher conformity rates?
It can be, for example with authority figures.
Collective cultures as opposed to individualistic cultures.
Define obedience
Behavioural change caused by commands of authority. For example, Milgram.
List 3 situational factors that affect obedience
The proximity of the victim; hearing proximity has most affect than seeing.
Authority of the experimenter; when the experimenter is in the room, there is more obedience.
Peer pressure.
Situation has a massive effect on obedience, however people don’t think this because of FAE. This is shown with the war of Kosovo
Discuss Burger’s study that was based on Milgram’s
This study was the same, except it only went up to 150 volts because of ethical reasons. This wasn’t much of an issue because in Milgram’s study, most of those who got up to 150 volts, went all the way. The obedience in Burger’s study was less, however, they still obeyed significantly. The obedience hasn’t changed over the years, it has stayed the same.
Discuss Hofling’s study about nurses
The experimenter asked nurses if they would give a patient an overdose if the doctor ordered it. All of them said no, but when the situation rose, 90% of the participants agreed to give the patient the medicine (clear overdose).
Discuss Latane’s Social Impact Theory
This theory claims that social influence depends on the strength of the source, the immediacy of the source, the number of people influencing. Studies have found that social pressure is reduced when the target is far from the source, e.g. telephone or when the target is accompanied by others. For example, a plane crashed because of a pilot’s error, even though passengers knew about the error, they didn’t say anything because they trusted the pilot (strong source).
Discuss Zajonc’s study about the presence of others
The presence of others helps your performance on easy tasks but impairs your performance on difficult tasks due to a thing called dominant response - research this.
This is defined as social facilitation.
Does a group perform better than individual members?
Steiner did an experiment and found that it depends on the task. Groups are better at additive tasks where the performance is the sum of all members, for example rope pulling. However, there’s also more loss as each member doesn’t use their full potential compared to people performing alone, this is called social loafing. This happens because of motivational loss aka people free-riding and co-ordination loss. Groups can tend to be better with compensatory tasks like guessing temperature as the performance is the group average. However, this only works if everyone gives an opinion and has the same influence. Group performance on disjunctive tasks varies a lot but mainly tends to be bad because the task involves forming one judgement so it depends on the quality of the judgement. It also depends on whether people are motivated to give their judgement and whether this judgement is accepted. Finally, groups are worse at conjunctive tasks as the weakest member determines the performance, for example cycling in a group.
How can you prevent social loafing?
Make everyone’s contribution identifiable, make the task important to each member, make individuals expect to be punished, make the group small, make it cohesive and make everyone feel like their contribution is needed.
