Social Influence Flashcards
Asch’s Study
Asch set out to investigate how people respond to group pressure - He wanted to study conformity. He asked 123 american male students to take the study, each was tested with a group of 6-8 confederates. The men were shown 2 large cards - One with a single black line (standard) and one with 3 comparison lines. On each trial each man was asked to say whether Line A,B or C was the same as the standard.
Aschs study part 2.
There were 18 total trials with 12 being Critical trials - on the first few confederates gave correct answers but on the other critical trials they purposefully gave wrong answers. 25% of participants never gave a wrong answer which means that 75% conformed at least once. This proves that when in a group humans will want to conform to the decisions around them to fit in.
Types of conformity
Compliance (Publicly agrees but internally disagrees), Internalization (Publicly changing behavior whilst also agreeing internally.),
Identification (Conforms to demands of a social role in society)
Explanations for conformity
Normative social influence is where a person conforms to fit in with the group and doesn’t want to be left out
Informational influence is when someone conforms because they desire to be right and look to others who they believe may have more information.
Note Jennes Beans jar experiment (Beans in a jar, asked to say how many. Peoples answers changed in a group and were much more similar)
Evaluating Aschs Study
- Low ecological validity as it was based on peoples perception of lines - not realistic.
- Study was only carried out on men - Gender bias
- Ethical issues - Deception and could not therefore give informed consent.
Zimbardo’s study
Stanford Prison Experiment - Zimbardo wanted to investigate how readily people would conform to social roles. Experiment was performed in basement of Stanford university’s psychology building. Prisoners and guards were issued uniforms and appropriate props. Within a very short time both guards and prisoners settled into their new roles - Within hours of beginning some guards began to harass prisoners. They behaved in a sadistic and brutal manner.
Zimbardo PT2.
Prisoners soon adopted prisoner like behavior too, talking about prison issues and telling tales on each other to the guards. The prisoners became more and more submissive. The guards controlled everything so the prisoners tried to find ways to please the guards.
Evaluation of Zimbardo’s study
Demand characteristics could explain the findings of the study. Most of the guards simply claimed they were acting later. The studies findings cannot be reasonably generalized to real life - Low Ecological Validity
Lacks Population validity - Only male US students
Strengths: Changed how the US prison system was run eg Juveniles were not put with adult prisoners before trial. Formal ethical guidelines were formed and recognized.
Weaknesses: Many ethical concerns - the experiment was unpredictable (even zimbardo didnt know what would happen) Also participants playing the prisoners were not protected from psychological harm - eg: One prisoner had to be released after 36 hours because of uncontrollable bursts of crying, screaming and anger. In Zimbardo’s defence however behaviour like this could not have been predicted from the outset
Define obedience
Obedience is a type of social influence when a person follows an order from another person who is usually an authority figure
Milgrams Shock Study
Milgram wanted to know why Germans were willing to kill Jews during the Holocaust. He thought that it might have been because German’s were just evil. He thought that Americans were different and would not have followed such orders. To test this ‘German’s are different’ hypothesis he carried out this study (outlined below).
Procedure: Milgram wanted to see whether people would obey a legitimate authority figure when given instructions to harm another human being.
He conducted a lab experiment in which two participants were assigned either the role of a teacher (this was always given to the true participant) or learner (a confederate called Mr. Wallace).
The teacher and learner were put into separate rooms. The teacher was then asked by the experimenter (who wore a lab coat) to administer electric shocks (which were actually harmless) to the learner each time he gave the wrong answer. These shocks increased every time the learner gave a wrong answer, from 15 - 450 volts.
Milgrams shock pt2.
The experimenter (Mr Williams) wore a grey lab coat and his role was to give a series of orders / prods when the participant refused to administer a shock. There were 4 prods and if one was not obeyed then the experimenter read out the next prod, and so on.
Prod 1: please continue.
Prod 2: the experiment requires you to continue.
Prod 3: It is absolutely essential that you continue.
Prod 4: you have no other choice but to continue.
Results: The results were that all participants went to 300 volts and 65% were willing to go all the way to 450 volts. Milgram did more than one experiment – he carried out 18 variations of his study.
All he did was alter the situation (IV) to see how this affected obedience (DV). For example, when the experimenter instructed and prompted the teacher by telephone from another room, obedience fell to 20.5%.
Evaluation of Milgrams Study
A limitation is that this study lacked ecological validity as it was carried out in a lab under artificial conditions. This means that it might not be possible to generalise the finding to a real life setting, as people do not usually receive orders to hurt another person in real life.
Another problem is that the sample was biased. Milgram only used males in his study and this means we cannot generalise the results to females.
Highlight the value that Milgram’s work has provided to social Psychology. For instance Milgram’s work gives an insight into why people under the Nazi reign were willing to kill Jews when given orders to do so. It also highlights how we can all be blind to obedience often doing things without question.
A strength of the study is that it used a standardised procedure because it was a lab experiment. This is good because it improves the reliability of the study and also helps establish a causal relationship.