obedience social influence

Question 1

obedience

Answer 1

Obedience is a type of social influence where a person follows an order from another person who is usually an authority figure.

Question 2

explanations for obedience milgrams shock study ao3

Answer 2

Deception – the participants actually believed they were shocking a real person, and were unaware the learner was a confederate of Milgram’s.

Protection of participants - Participants were exposed to extremely stressful situations that may have the potential to cause psychological harm. Many of the participants were visibly distressed.

Signs of tension included trembling, sweating, stuttering, laughing nervously, biting lips and digging fingernails into palms of hands. Three participants had uncontrollable seizures, and many pleaded to be allowed to stop the experiment.

Question 3

agentic state

Answer 3

Agency theory says that people will obey an authority when they believe that the authority will take responsibility for the consequences of their actions. This is supported by some aspects of Milgram’s evidence

Question 4

outline one advantage of conducting obedience research outside a laboratory setting

Answer 4

one advantage of conducting research outside a laboratory means that it will be high in ecological validity , meaning results can be generalised beyond the setting

Question 5

outline one limitation of conducting obedience research outside a laboratory setting

Answer 5

one limitation is that there will be a lack of control , this means that the results may be influenced by other factors

Question 6

discuss the authoritarian personality as an explanation for obedience (8marks) ao1

Answer 6

ao1- Adorno felt that personality (i.e. dispositional) factors rather than situational (i.e. environmental) factors could explain obedience. He proposed that there was such a thing as an authoritarian personality, i.e. a person who favours an authoritarian social system and, admires obedience to authority figures.

a01 - One of the various characteristics of the authoritarian personality was that the individual is hostile to those who are of inferior status, but obedient of people with high status

-a01 He investigated 2000 middle class, white Americans and their unconscious attitudes towards other racial groups using the F-scale to measure Authoritarian personality

Question 7

discuss the authoritarian personality as an explanation for obedience (8marks)ao3

Answer 7

May be better explanations – Prejudice and submissiveness could just as easily be caused by a poor standard of education as a child – Theory lacks internal validity as it assumes obedience is caused by dispositional explanations when it may be situational variables.

Adorno used a biased sample; he only use 2000 middle class americans , who are more likely to have an authoritarian personality because of the time of the study therefore the research lacks historical validity so conclusions can be can’t be generalised to people out side the study