Psychology-Social influence Flashcards
What is conformity?
Giving in to group pressure. Occurs when an individuals behaviour and/or beliefs are influenced by a large group of people, which is why conformity is also known as majority influence
What three types of conformity did Kelman propose (in order of shallowest level to deepest level)?
Compliance, identification and internalisation
What is compliance?
Individuals may go along with the group in order to gain their approval or avoid their disapproval. When exposed to the views or actions of the majority, individuals may engage in a process of social comparison, concentrating on what others say or do so that they can adjust their own actions to fit in with them (publicly agree-privately disagree)
What is identification?
In some instances, an individual might accept influence because they want to be associated with another person or group. They adopt their views because they want to be associated with the group (agree publicly and privately, but only when they are part of the group)
What is internalisation?
Individuals may go along with the group because of an acceptance of their views. They accept influence because the content of the attitude of behaviour proposed is consistent with their own value system (agree publicly and privately)
What are the two main explanations for conformity?
Normative social influence and informational social influence
What is normative social influence?
We adapt our behaviour to fit social expectations to fit in, be liked and avoid ridicule. Typically involves compliance and stops when there is no more group pressure to conform
What is informational social influence?
When we lack the knowledge to form a judgement and look to the group pressure for guidance. It occurs in ambiguous situations where a correct answer isn’t obvious. Typically leads to internalisation and the change in behaviour is permanent
What was the experiment linked to this?
Asch’s study in 1955
What did Asch want to find out?
How the participant would react to the behaviour of the confederates
What was the experiment?
Participants thought they were testing visual discrimination, they were then placed in a room of confederates and shown a line, then three other lines of varying sizes (one obviously the same as the original line). The confederates then gave consistent wrong answers when asked to match the lines and then the participant was asked which line matched the original line
What were the results?
In the 12 critical trials, on average, 33% of participants conformed, so it is an example of informational social influence
What are the strengths of Asch’s experiment?
Supporting research eg Jenness-how many sweets in a jar…and his results had high reliability as they were conducted in a lab
What are the weaknesses of Asch’s experiment?
Lacks population validity as they were all male American college students..Lacks ecological validity as it was in a lab…Ethical issues as the participants didn’t know they were the only real participants and must have felt a lot of pressure creating psychological harm
What are the factors affecting conformity?
Group size, unanimity and task difficulty
How does group size affect conformity?
One participant, one confederate =less than 1% conformity
One participant, two confederates=13%
One participant, three confederates=32%
One participant, up to 15 confederates=32%
How does unanimity affect conformity?
When the real participant was given the support of either a real participant or a confederate, conformity dropped from 33% to 5.5%.
When a lone dissenter gave an answer both different from the majority and different from the true answer, conformity dropped from 33% 5o 9%
How does task difficulty affect conformity?
As the task was made more complicated by the lines being made more similar, the level of conformity increased, suggesting that informational social influence is a key driving force in behaviour
What is the key study for conformity to social roles?
The Stanford prison experiment which ended after six days as it was too unethical
What were the methodological issues?
Ecological validity, demand characteristics, population validity, culture/gender bias and application to real life
What were the ethical issues?
Informed consent, deception, protection from harm and ethical guidelines
What is social identity theory?
A persons sense of who they are depends on the groups to which they belong. An individual doesn’t just have a personal selfhood, but multiple selves and identities associated with their affiliated groups. When an individual identifies themselves as part of a group, that is one of their in-groups. Other comparable groups become out-groups
What is the in-group/out-group process?
Social categorisation, social identification and social comparison
What does social identity theory predict that groups that break down or rebel against other groups may have?
Poor or not leadership, no fairness within the group and no way to improve your status in the group called legitimacy, no permeability in the group as individuals cant move up in the system and resources are unequal, and a lack of feeling positively valued by the group
What were the results of Milgram’s electric shock generator research?
He predicted that 2% of people would shock to the highest level, however all participants shocked up to 350 volts and 65% of participants shocked all the way up to 450 volts, even though the learner had all ready gone silent before that point
What is an autonomous state?
When someone is in control and acts according to their own wishes
What is an agentic state?
When someone is acting on behalf of somebody else (an agent of the authority figure)
Why may someone in an agentic state act in a way that breaks their moral code?
Loss of responsibility (responsibility to do what the authority says but no responsibility for the outcome) self image (no responsibility for actions as it doesn’t affect their self image so they are guilt free) and social etiquette (no responsibility would feel rude or under cooperative for not following as its not socially acceptable to ignore higher authority
What is supporting research for this?
In Milgrams experiment, when the experimenter wasn’t in the same room, obedience dropped from 65% to 20.5%
What is a legitimate authority?
When you know someone has a position of authority and power and believe it
What is supporting research for this?
In Milgrams experiment, when the experiment moved to a run down New York City office, obedience dropped from 65% to 48%
What are strengths of the explanations of obedience?
Supporting research (Hofling-21 of 22 nurses followed the strange instructions over the phone) and there are real life examples (American soldiers murdered everyone in a Vietnam village, killing 500+ innocent, unarmed villagers and not one soldier refused)
What are the weaknesses of the explanations of obedience?
The strength of the legitimacy argument (Milgrams study in the NYC office, obedience levels only dropped to 48% which is still quite high)
What are the situational factors affecting obedience?
Touch proximity (obedience fell to 30%), room proximity (dropped to 40%), location (dropped to 48%) and uniform (dropped to 20%)
What is a dispositional factor?
To do with the person, not the situation
What is a dispositional factor affecting obedience?
The authoritarian personality
What two methods were used by Adorno in his research into the authoritarian personality?
Interviews about political views and early childhood experiences, and projective tests to see if they were racially prejudiced
How is an authoritarian personality formed?
Childhood, respect of authority, hostility, repression, displacement
What personality characteristics does this lead to?
A need for strong leadership, a belief in aggression to those who don’t subscribe to conventional thinking/who are different, a blind allegiance to conventional beliefs about right and wrong, and a tendency to project own feelings of inadequacy, rage and fear onto a scapegoated group
What is supporting research?
Milgram (higher scorers on F scale gave stronger shocks when ordered to) Elms and Milgram (Higher levels of authoritarianism in more obedient original participants) and Miller (held live wires while completing math problems and those who scored higher on F scale were more likely to obey)
What research goes against this?
Zilmer (only 3/16 of the Nazi war criminals tested, rated highly on the F scale)
What are the strengths of the factors affecting obedience?
Supporting research, helps explains milgrams findings-lack of 100% (individual differences)
What are the weaknesses of the factors affecting obedience?
Nearly all participants administered electric shocks but didn’t all have authoritarian personality, lacks flexibility to account for variations (evidence for situational and dispositional but don’t go together) and one approach ignores the other
Define control?
Control over your own decisions, behaviours and outcomes
Define locus?
Location
What do people who base success on their own wok and believe they control their lives have?
An internal locus of control
What do people who attribute their success or failure to outside influences have?
An external locus of control
What type of locus of control is the most resistant to social pressure?
Internal locus of control
What are the evaluation points for types and explanations of conformity?
Difficult to distinguish between compliance and internalisation (hard to measure), research support for normative (Inkenbach and Perkins smoking posters), research support for informational (Fein us president candidate performance judgement based on knowledge of others’ reactions), Normative may not be detected (Nolan et al), informational is moderated by task type
What are the evaluation points for Asch’s study?
‘Child of its time’ (McCarthyism), problems with determining the effect of group size (Bond-no studies have used a majority size larger than 9 except Asch), independent behaviour rather than conformity (in 2/3 of trials, participants stuck to their own answers), unconvincing confederates ( Mori and Arai overcame this with glasses that showed the participants different results and proved the original confederates had acted convincingly), cultural difference in conformity (Smith et al, conformity is higher in collectivist cultures as it is more favourable)
What are the evaluation points for conformity to social roles?
Conformity to roles isn’t automatic (Haslam and Reicher-some guards chose to be good or bad), demand characteristics (Banuzizi and Movahedi showed students details of SPE and most guessed the aim), ethical issues, relevance to Abu Ghraib and lessons learnt
What did Asch find about social support?
It allows an individual to resist conformity pressure from the majority (shown by a variation of his research when an ally was added, reducing conformity from 33% to 5.5%)
What is the most important point about social support?
It breaks the unanimity of the majority as that then raises the possibility of other legitimate ways of thinking, increasing confidence to stand up to the majority-disobedient peers act as role models when standing up to an authority figure (variation of Milgram experiment had three teachers, two being confederates, and when one withdrew, only 10% of participants shocked to maximum level)
What are the evaluation points for resistance to social influence? **
Historical trend towards external locus of control (increasing externality in terms of alienation experienced by young people), locus of control is related to normative but not informational (Spector-locus of control isn’t significant with informational social influence), social support may not have to be valid to be effective (ally is helpful to resist influence but more so when they are perceived to be valid), social support in real life (Rosenstrasse protest)
How does minority influence spread?
Its a conversion process where people scrutinise the message in order to understand why the minority hold this view, it is therefore often deeper and longer lasting as people internalise the minority’s point of view
What must the minority show in order to be successful?
Consistency (same message over time), commitment (sacrifices) and flexibility (negotiate their position with the majority=more succesful than enforcing it)
What is the key study into minority influence?
Moscovici et al 1969
What was Moscovici’s study?
Groups consisted of four participants and a minority of two confederates and then had to judge the colour of a slide. The minority gave the wrong answers and there were two conditions, one where the minority was consistent in their wrong answer, and another where they were inconsistent.
What were the results of the Moscovici study?
The consistent minority influenced the participants on over 8% of trials and the inconsistent group did not have much influence (their results didn’t differ much from the control group)
What are the evaluation points for minority influence?
Research support for flexibility (jury situation study where lawyer influenced majority when they were flexible, but only when they shifted late into the negotiations), the real ‘value’ of minority influence (with minorities, people take more time to research and try to understand their point and are stimulate more creative thought), ‘tipping point’ for commitment (xie et al found a point where the number of people in the minority is sufficient to change the majority(10%)), minority influence in name only (still difficult to convince people of value to dissent so they accept the principle only on the surface as they fear lack of harmony)
What is an example of social change caused by minority influence?
The suffragettes + women’s rights
What are the stages of creating social change through minority influence?
Drawing attention to an issue, cognitive conflict, consistency of position, the augmentation principle and the snowball effect
How did the suffragettes go through the conversion stages to then create social change?
- educational and political tactics to draw attention to the issue, 2. conflict for majority group members between existing status quo and position advocated by the suffragettes, 3. consistent in their views regardless of the majority and protested for years, 4. minority willing to suffer for their views they are seen as more committed and so taken more seriously eg suffragettes risked imprisonment and death eg from hunger strikes, 5. tipping point leads to wide-scale social change as more people consider the issue (women then allowed to vote)
How does social change happen through majority influence (conformity)
Social norms interventions-behaviour is based on what people think others believe and do. The gap between perceived and actual norms is called misperception. An example is the ‘Most of us don’t drink and drive’ posters, while only 20.4% had done so, people believed that 92% of others had, the posters corrected the misperception (social norms intervention) leading to a decrease in drink driving to 13.7%
What are the evaluation points for social influence processes in social change?
Social change by minority influence is generally slow and gradual and so is generally more hidden than direct, being perceived as deviant limits the influence of minorities as the majority want to avoid that label, there are limitations of the social norms approach (it hasn’t always led to social change-Dejong tried it in schools about alcohol but the misperception was hardly corrected after seeing the posters), social norms and the ‘boomerang effect’ (campaigns are aimed at those whose behaviour os less desirable than the norm so they will become more desirable but those who are more desirable than the norm also get the message and so may become less desirable, shown in Schultz research on electricity use (those who used less than the norm increased their use))
