Psychology - Social influence

Question 1

What is NSI (Normative social influence)?

Answer 1

Normative Social Influence is where a person conforms in order to be accepted and belong to a group. They do this because it is socially rewarding and/or to avoid social rejection (e.g. ridicule for not ‘fitting in’).
Normative social influence is about norms. i.e. what is normal or typical behavior for a social group.
It is an emotional process because it is concerned with the behavior people do in order to feel a certain way.

Question 2

What is social influence?

Answer 2

Social influence is the process by which an individual’s attitudes, beliefs, or behavior are modified (changed) by the presence or action of others.

Question 3

What type of conformity does Normative Social Influence lead to?

Answer 3

NSI leads to public compliance, without private attitude changes as you only conform to be liked not because you agree with what the majority are doing.

Question 4

What is conformity?

Answer 4

Conformity is a type of social influence involving a change in belief or behavior in order to fit in with the majority (majority influence). Depending on the type of conformity, private beliefs may be changed.

Question 5

What did Wittenbrink & Henley (1996) do?

Answer 5

Wittenbrink and Henley found that participants exposed to negative information about African Americans later reported more negative beliefs about black individuals.
Ppts were given a questionnaire with the responses either on the left or right. The column on the right implies negative truths about African Americans.
In a follow-up, ‘unrelated’ task, they had to judge an African American defendant in a mock trial. They were more likely to judge the defendant negatively if they had received the questionnaire on the right.

Question 6

What are the three types of conformity?

Answer 6

Compliance, Identification, and Internalisation

Question 7

What did Lucas (2006) do?

Answer 7

Lucas asked students to give answers to mathematical problems that were easy or more difficult. There was a greater conformity to incorrect answers when they were difficult rather than when they were easy. This was most true for those who rated their mathematical ability as poor. The study showed that people conform when they don’t know the answer.

Question 8

What did Schultz (2008) ? NSI

Answer 8

The power of influence to change behavior in positive ways has been demonstrated to persuade guests in a hotel to reuse their towels rather than having fresh ones each day. Schultz (2008) gathered data from 132 hotels and 794 hotel rooms where guests stayed for a week.
Assigned to control experimental conditions. In the control, a door hanger informs guests of the environmental benefits of reusing a towel in their experimental condition. In addition to the information, guests were informed that 75% of their guests go to reuse their towels each day. The results showed that in comparison to the control group, guests reduced their need for towels by 25%.

Question 9

What is compliance?

Answer 9

A person may agree in public with a group of people but the person actually privately disagrees with the group’s viewpoint or behavior. They do this to gain approval or avoid disproval.

Question 10

What was Asch’s (1951) research stats?

Answer 10

32% of participants conformed
Only 5% of the participants conformed to all 12 wrong answers over the critical trials.
75% of participants confirmed at least once.
Control group less than 1% of participants had the wrong answer.

Question 11

What were Asch’s variations?

Answer 11

Group size-
Unanimity
Task Difficulty

Question 12

What does ISI ( informative social influence) lead to?

Answer 12

ISI leads to public and private acceptance of the majority’s beliefs as they conform because they believe they are correct. They internalize these beliefs, producing attitude change.

Question 13

What did Perrin and Spencer (1980) evaluate?

Answer 13

Lacks historical validity- conformity has changed over time
Lacks reliability- couldn’t be replicated

Question 14

What is internalisation ?

Answer 14

A person behaves or agrees with a group of people because they have actually accepted the group’s point of view or beliefs. This results in a change in the person’s private beliefs and attitudes, as a result, it may have longer-lasting effects.

Question 15

How did Neto ( 1955) evaluate?

Answer 15

Andocentric/ cultrally bias

Question 16

What does it mean to conform to social roles?

Answer 16

Social roles are the ‘parts’ people play as members of various social groups. Parents, students, and passengers follow expectations of what we and others consider appropriate behavior. Conformity to social roles is when an individual adopts a particular behavior and belief while in a particular social situation.

Question 17

Who developed the two-process theory ?

Answer 17

Deutsch and Gerard (1955)

Question 18

What was Zimbardo’s (1971) experiment?

Answer 18

His aim was to examine whether people would conform to the social roles of a prison guard or a prisoner when placed in a mock prison environment. Furthermore, he also wanted to examine whether the behavior displayed in prisons was due to internal dispositional factors, (personality) or external situational factors, (the environment and the conditions of the prison).

Question 19

What is identification?

Answer 19

The individual takes on the views of a group they join or they admire, but it does not necessarily result in a change of a person’s private beliefs.

Question 20

What were the results of Zimbardo’s experiment?

Answer 20

The guards took up their roles with enthusiasm, but soon became a threat to the prisoner’s physical and psychological health, causing the study to stop just after six days rather than the intended 14 days. The guards dehumanize the prisoners, which results in the prisoners becoming increasingly submissive, identifying further with their subordinate role.

Question 21

What was the two-process theory?

Answer 21

People conform for these two reasons :
1. The need to be right (ISI)
2. The need to be liked (NSI).

Question 22

What is deindividuation (Zimbardo 1971)?

Answer 22

Deindividuation is when people begin to lose their sense of their own identity and become too immersed in roles in the norms of the group.

Question 23

What is the case of Abu Ghraib?

Answer 23

From 2003- 2004 Us Army committed serious human rights violations against Iraqi prisoners.
They were physically / sexually assaulted they were humiliated some were murdered
The abuse made the world question how the power of the situation/ social roles can make apparently ordinary people do horrific things.

Question 24

What did Reicher and Haslam (2006) do ?

Answer 24

Reicher and Haslam replicated Zimbardo’s research by randomly assigning 15 men to the role of prisoner or guard. In this replication, the participants did not conform to their social roles automatically.

For example, the guards did not identify with their status and refused to impose their authority; the prisoners identified as a group to challenge the guard’s authority, which resulted in a shift of power and a collapse of the prison system. These results clearly contradict the findings of Zimbardo and suggest that conformity to social roles may not be automatic, as Zimbardo originally implied.

Question 25

What was Milgrims experiment ?

Answer 25

Milgram (1963) wanted to investigate whether Germans were particularly obedient to authority figures, as this was a common explanation for the Nazi killings in World War II.

Milgram selected participants for his experiment by newspaper advertising for male participants to take part in a study of learning at Yale University.

The procedure was that the participant was paired with another person and they drew lots to find out who would be the ‘learner’ and who would be the ‘teacher.’ The draw was fixed so that the participant was always the teacher, and the learner was one of Milgram’s confederates (pretending to be a real participant). The learner (a confederate called Mr. Wallace) was taken into a room and had electrodes attached to his arms, and the teacher and researcher went into a room next door that contained an electric shock generator and a row of switches marked from 15 volts (Slight Shock) to 375 volts (Danger: Severe Shock) to 450 volts (XXX).

The shocks in Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments were not real. The “learners” were actors who were part of the experiment and did not actually receive any shocks.

However, the “teachers” (the real participants of the study) believed the shocks were real, which was crucial for the experiment to measure obedience to authority figures even when it involved causing harm to others.
Milgram (1963) was interested in researching how far people would go in obeying an instruction if it involved harming another person.

Question 26

When was Milgrims experiment ?

Answer 26

1963

Question 27

Who made the three types of conformity?

Answer 27

Kelman (1958)

Question 28

What did Tajfel (1981) do?

Answer 28

He used the social identity theory to explain the difference in findings. There are two groups in group and out group . In order to be socially accepted, people must adopt in-group behavior.

Question 29

What is obedience ?

Answer 29

Obedience is a form of social influence in which an individual follows a direct order from an authority figure, who has the power to punish when behavior isn’t obedient.

Question 30

What did Jerry Burger ( 2009)

Answer 30

Jerry’s research aimed to recreate Milgrim’s experiment with ethical guidelines. Voltage was lower and people with mental health issues who may react badly were excluded. These results were difficult to compare because of the changes made such as people being able to leave, meaning authority may have been reduced. He still found a high obedience rate of 70% with no difference between males and females.

Question 31

What did Hoffling (1966) do ?

Answer 31

• The procedure involved a field experiment involving** 22 (real) night nurses.** Dr. Smith (the researcher) phones the nurses at a psychiatric hospital (on night duty) and asks them to check the medicine cabinet to see if they have the drug astroten.
• In the experimental group 21 out of 22 (95%) nurses obeyed the doctor’s orders and were about to administer the medication to the patient when a hidden observer stopped them.
• Only one nurse questioned the identity of the researcher (“Doctor Smith”) and why he was on the ward.
• The nurses were not supposed to take instructions by phone, let alone exceed the allowed dose.
• 11 nurses who went to administer the drug admitted to being aware of the dosage for Astroten. The other 10 did not notice but judged that it was safe as a doctor had ordered them to do so.
• When other nurses were asked to discuss what they would do in a similar situation (i.e. a control group), 31 out of 33 said they would not comply with the order.
• Hofling’s study** showed how the social pressure brought about by the imbalance of power could lead to a nurse actually putting a patient at risk,** rather than disobeying orders.

Question 32

**Evalution of Hoffling 1966 **

Answer 32

**Strengths **
* A strength of this study is that it has high levels of ecological validity, due to the fact it was conducted in a real life environment.

• Nurses were unaware of the experiment so there were** no demand characteristics **as they were going about their everyday job, acting as they would normally.
• Another strength is the high level of reliability, as the study followed a standardized procedure (the “doctor” gave the same “scripted” instructions to each nurse over the phone), so it can be replicated. Deciding when the phone call ended was also operationalized.
• Finally, a** control group** was also used which allowed comparisons to be made. Participants variables were minimized as the nurses in the experimental and control groups
• were closely matched for age, sex, marital status, length of working week, professional experience and area of origin (matched participants).

Weaknesses
* The control group comprised 33 nurses, whereas there is only data for 22 nurses in the experiment. This indicates that the study had a high rate of attrition (i.e. high drop out rate).

• The study broke the ethical guideline of deception, as neither the doctor was real. Also, some were left distressed by the study so lacked protection from harm. All nurses were debriefed within 30 minutes of the phone call.

* Rank and Jacobson (1977) tried to replicate Hoflings study using a real drug which the nurses had heard of, but did not get similar results.

• They believed that the nurse’s knowledge of the drug, specifically the consequence of an overdose, meant they could justify their defiance to the doctor more easily.

Question 33

What did Mandel (1998) do ?

Answer 33

The ‘obdience alibi’
He argued that this offers an excuse or ‘alibi for evil behavoiur. In this view, it is a offense to surviors of the Holocaust as it siggest that Nazis were simply obeying orders and were victims themselves of sitational factors.

Question 34

Milgrims Variations

Answer 34

1. Change in Location to a seedy office- caused a decrease from the origanl 65% to 47.5
2. Teacher and leaner in same room - decrease** 40%. **
3. Touch proximty - decrease to 30%
4. Remote instruction -** 20.5 %**
5. Change in legitimate authority figure - 20%
   CRITA

Question 35

Bickman (1974)

Answer 35

1. Three male reasrchers randomly selected 153 pedestrians in New York. The reseracher eas either in a suit and tie, a milkman,or a guard uniform.
2. **The guard was obeyed on 76% , he milkman on 47% and the pedestrian on 30%
   This is beacuse the uniform infers a sense of legitiame authority and power

Question 36

Bushman (1988)

Answer 36

He replicated Bickman’s study with females
* 72% dressed as guard
* 48% dressed as a businesswoman
* 52% dressed as a beggar

Question 37

Orne and Holland (1968)

Answer 37

• Orne and Holland (1968) accused Milgram’s study of lacking ‘experimental realism,”’ i.e.,” participants might not have believed the experimental set-up they found themselves in and knew the learner wasn’t receiving electric shocks.
• Lacks internal valididty- causing demand characteristics
• Lacks ecological validity - artifical setting

Question 38

Sheridan and King (1972)

Answer 38

Sheridan and King (1972) suggests participants would have acted the same with real shocks- when instructed to give real (non-lethal) shocks to a real-life puppy, most participants obeyed.
54% of males
100% females

Question 39

Milgrims methodology

Answer 39

• Highly controlled
• He alteresd one variable at a time
• Study was standardised
• However, it was artificial lacks ecological validity