Majority Influence

Question 1

What is social influence?

Answer 1

Allport: attempt to understand and explain how the thought, feeling and behaviour of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others

Question 2

Is social influence deliberate or not deliberate?

Answer 2

Other people do make deliberate attempts to try and persuade us - but we are sucesptile to social influence even when others are not necessarily trying to influence others - we do adapt our behaviour to fit in with others, even if they aren’t tryin

Question 3

Who are we influenced by?

Answer 3

Majority - conformity - exposure to the opinions of a majority or the majority of ones group

Minority - innovation - situation in which either an individual or a group in a numerical minority can influence the majority

Question 4

Why do people think we live in a ‘post-truth’ world?

Answer 4

Because fake news abounds, facts are opinions, and there are alternative facts - world has changed, facts have changed. People have access to ways of stating their views and hearing the similar views of others - social media: deliberately restricting the information which is there, so only info you want to hear

Question 5

What is Westmonster?

Answer 5

A website - with right wing views, find articles reinforcing your beliefs, you can access sources to support what you believe, but not always deliberately because sometimes the news automatically shapes the information which is presented to you based on previous searches

Question 6

What is an echo chamber?

Answer 6

Situation in which information is reinforced by communication inside a defined system - official sources go unquestioned, and different views are censored, disallowed or underrepresented - surrounding yourself with others views

Question 7

What is the independent?

Answer 7

Some claims being made ‘social media echo chambers gifted Donald Trump the presidency’

Question 8

What is assimilation and accommodation?

Answer 8

Assimilation - integrating information that we receive into our existing beliefs
Accommodation - changing our beliefs
We find it easier and prefer to assimilate information to our pre-existing beliefs, opinions and changes than to change these beliefs

Question 9

What is the problem with existing experimental work on majority and minority influence?

Answer 9

It is about how we respond to information that conflicts with our existing beliefs, opinions and attitudes: doesn’t look at the info that doesn’t do this. in particular when individuals experiences conflict with most of those around him or her (the majority) or some that conflict around him or her (minority)

Question 10

What is the problem with shaping our world to reduce or eliminate sources of disagreement or inhabiting a world where there is little tension to resolve?

Answer 10

Reduced or no pressures to accommodate and change our beliefs - we don’t want to change them
We get less experienced or adopt at dealing with contradictory information so if we then encounter alien beliefs we are more susceptible - even more to minority influence

Question 11

Do our beliefs become fragile?

Answer 11

How do we know what’s majority and what’s minority opinion - might not be aware what beliefs are

Question 12

Why do people not want to live lives on their own?

Answer 12

Because they fear criticisms - so their friends and the public are such a huge influence

Question 13

Who is the main student of social psychology?

Answer 13

Solomon Asch - series of experiments, trying to understand when people are more resistant and less resistant

Question 14

Who is Sherif?

Answer 14

Asch’s work was stimulated by the work of Sherif on social norm formation and transmission

Question 15

What is the auto kinetic effect?

Answer 15

Sherif - got loads of people in a room, to make a judgement about stationary light out loud - ambiguous as it didn’t actually move. their judgements all converged, even though it was subjective, still changed their mind - use the norms that were created in the situation even when alone, still changed views

Question 16

What are social norms?

Answer 16

Belief systems about how or how not to behave, guide behaviours, without the force of laws, that reflect group members- shred expectations about typical activities - these are a key of social media, extent to which experiences on social media change our social norms

Question 17

What are the types of social norms?

Answer 17

Descriptive - sense of how many people are doing something

Injunctive norms - what you should be doing

Question 18

What were the Asch experiments?

Answer 18

Series of experiments
Basic experiments
Show a line, ask them to match what line it fits
18 trials, differing number of confederates
Naive ppt last but one to call out
Confederates made errors on 12/18 trials, starting at trial 3
Unanimous (in agreement) majority

Question 19

What were the basic findings of Asch 1952?

Answer 19

one third of responses were errors, but absolutely no one conformed. 74% made at least one error, yet 56% made three of fewer errors, compared with zero error rate when they did task alone
even on this ask, they conformed, some degree of resistance
Error defined as: not recalling the correct line (not recalling the same line as the confederate). quite often people recalled a different line to the confederate but still was wrong

Question 20

What did Asch expect?

Answer 20

People not to conform - where conformity = yielding by calling the incorrect line on trials - he was surprised by the extent of yielding

Question 21

What did he want to look at?

Answer 21

Individual differences in response to an ambiguous stimulus - he wanted to create a situation where people would resist influence then introduce them to the factors that made them conform - but already had conformed

Question 22

Was group size or group unanimity more important?

Answer 22

Group unanimity (people in fully agreement)

Question 23

What happened post-asch?

Answer 23

Crutchfield - atuomation: made the study more like our social media worlds, research has moved away from the face-to-face contact that was so vivid in Asch - perhaps virtual reality will encourage researchers to create more Asch like settings

Question 24

When do people conform?

Answer 24

Group size
Unanimity
Culture

Question 25

Effect of group size in Asch’s study

Answer 25

The effects of group size tail off when the group size is around 3, more errors when group size smaller. Each individual adding, smaller effect on the error rate

Question 26

Effect of unanimity in Asch’s study

Answer 26

When in consensus, the error rate it high but when there are 2 true ppts, and 1 true ppt but 1 confederate the error rate goes right down
when confederate isn’t present - but when they change mind and go along with rest of group, no impact
more effective them not being there than changing their mind

Question 27

Effect of culture in Asch’s studies

Answer 27

Collectivist cultures were more susceptible to influence - less yielding in Europe and North America

Question 28

What are the ways of being independent / not conforming?

Answer 28

Confident
withdrawn and quiet
in tension and doubtful

Question 29

What are the reasons for yielding?

Answer 29

Distortion of perception - saw the line as being the correct Line, perception was wrong

Distortion of judgement - realised they misunderstood the situation, just went along with others

Distortion of action - just went with the flow, understood something odd was going on

Question 30

What did Jahoda point out?

Answer 30

Every participant was affected by the situation
they questionned their own judgement, not those of the majority
most agreed with the majority, even if they didn’t actually do so

Question 31

What are the theoretical explanations of social influence?

Answer 31

Deutsch and Gerard:
informational social influence
normative social influence

Turner:
referent informational influence

Question 32

What did Deutsch and Gerard make a distinction between?

Answer 32

Informational social influence - accept information as evidence of reality, we use others to give us clues as how to behave (auto kinetic - others judgements help us in ambiguous situation). When dominant, goal is to be accurate and valid

Normative social influence - conform with the positive expectations of others, need for social approval or harmony, want to win approval of others. The goal is to comply in public, without accepting it in private - so what you say in public isn’t what you actually believe

Question 33

What did Turner come up with?

Answer 33

Referent informational influence - adopting the norms beliefs and behaviours of the prototypical in-group member
We use others as sources of info but only if they are members tat we belong too, we get uncomfortable if people in our group are doing things we don’t agree with. Not informational vs normative, always informationl but want the information from group members
Maximises similarities between in-group members and differences between outgroup members

Question 34

Evidence for referent informational influence

Answer 34

Abrams et al - asked to make judgements in private or public. The confederates were introduced as students from other uni, studying history (outgroup) or psychology (in-group).
Results: if in-group, get referent influence, behaviour would conform more, but when history, naive would have no desire to agree with them so get a reduction of conformity - only happens in public, in private conformity level between these pretty equal

Question 35

What do people who yield believe?

Answer 35

Goal of accuracy - see things more accurately
Goal of affiliation - has the approval/acceptance of others
Goal of maintaining a positive self-concept - avoided a self-concept as different, deviant or difficult

Question 36

What 3 motivations provide the bases for someone’s responses to influence attempts?

Answer 36

Ciadini and Goldstein
goal of accuracy
goal of affiliation
goal of maintaining a positive self-concept

Question 37

What motivations do people have for social situations?

Answer 37

Action - facilitate the group working effectively
Relationships - gain approval or acceptance from others in the group
Self-concept - avoid a self-conception as different or deviant
Understanding - see things accurately