Majority Influence Flashcards
What is social influence?
At the heart of social psychology. Using norms that apply in a situation to guide your behaviour. Other people make deliberate attempts to persuade us, but we are susceptible to social influence even when others are not necessarily trying to influence us. Differentiate this into influence of the majority and influence of the minority.
What is an echo chamber?
An echo chamber is place where you go and people echo back views you already have. This has implications for considering majority influence.
What is persuasion?
We tend to favour assimilation over accommodation. Idea is we set up belief systems and are naturally inclined to implement information to our pre-existing beliefs and attitudes, rather than to change them.
What is the problem of attitude change?
Literature is all about how people cope when they are exposed to ideas that conflict with their own - is all about conflict. However, we can shape the experience of information to reduce this conflict.
What are the consequences if we do get attitude change?
Possibility is we get less experienced or adept at dealing with contradictory information (e.g. the “inoculation effect”, McGuire, 1961) so if we then encounter alien beliefs we are more susceptible - even more open to minority influence potentially.
What is majority influence?
Work of Solomon Asch (Asch experiment’s) to understand the circumstances that people would resist and yield to majority influence. This work had its origin in Muzafer Sherif - auto kinetic effect. Got people to be in a room and make judgements on stationary light. Found judgements will converge.
What are social norms?
Key elements of our everyday life - we are highly sensitive to perceiving norms in a given situation. Descriptive norms - your sense of how many people are doing whatever it is: this may influence your behaviour. Injunctive norms - what you are expected to do, e.g. by your peers. Often a gap between descriptive and inductive norms.
What is the Asch paradigm?
Series of experiments. 18 trials. Differing number of confederates. Naive participants last one to call out. Confederates made errors on 12/18 of trials. This led to concern on the part of the naive participants.
What are the basic findings of the 1952 Asch experiment?
1/3 of responses were errors. But no one absolutely conformed. However 74% made at least one error, yet 56% made three of fewer errors. Compared with almost zero error rate when did task alone. Asch wanted to examine individual differences in response to an unambiguous stimulus. In its effects on conformity, Asch found group unanimity was more important than group size.
When do people conform?
Group size is one variable, but is not as powerful an influence as one may think. Asch (1955) found effects started to trail off after group size reaches 3 people. However when there is consensus in the majority error rate is high, but when there is another one in agreement this error rate drops.
How do people conform?
Individual differences that meant people remained independent: confidence, remained withdrawn, and others showed great tension and doubt when resisting. Participants how yielded to influence provided reasons for this: distortion of perception (called it as they saw it, had become distorted), distortion of judgement (thought they had got it wrong so went along with the others) and distortion of action (understood something strange was going on, and said the wrong thing just because).
What did Marie Jahoda (1959) find?
Everyone was affected in some sort of way. They tended to question their own judgement, not that of the majority. Most longed to agree with the majority, even if they didn’t actually do so. Some feeling they were the source of the problem, and wanted a reconnection with the majority.
What is Deutsch and Gerard (1955)’s theory on why people conform?
Separates two ways we use other people as sources of influence. One is informational social influence - use others to disambiguate a situation, and give us a clue of how to behave. Use others for information. Goal is to make accurate judgements. The Sherif auto kinetic experiment taken as a prime example of this. In our everyday life there are normative social influence - want to win approval and avoid disapproval of others. Get compliance - do something in private that you don’t believe in private.
What is Turner’s theory on why people conform?
Referent informational influence - idea that we use other people as sources of information if they are members of a group we perceive ourselves as belonging to (in-group member). We get uncomfortable when people we think we belong to do something other than you believe to be right. Therefore, social belonging is key to social influence. Because we want to belong to the group, we behave in ways that will make us similar to that group.
What did Abrams et al (1990) find?
Made judgements in private and in public, with 3 others that were either students on the same uni course as them, or another course. In in-group condition get much more conformity than out-group condition: in private condition, do not get any differences.
