SOCIAL INFLUENCE Flashcards
Name the three types of conformity.
- Compliance
- Internalisation
- Identification.
Elizabeth is watching football when she is told by her father to wash the dishes.
She immediately does as her father has instructed her to.
Is Elizabeth conforming or showing obedience?
Elizabeth is showing obedience to her father who is a figure of authority.
Explain one strength and one weakness of Piliavin’s (1969) study.
STRENGTH: A strength of the study is that it has ecological validity as the study was conducted in a natural environment and the passengers would be behaving naturally. Therefore, the findings can be said to be true of normal bystander behaviour in such a situation.
WEAKNESS: Passengers were unaware they were being observed or taking part in a Psychology experiment.
This means that they had not given consent to take part and may not have chosen to do so if they had been asked beforehand.
What was the aim of Zimbardo’s 1973 study?
To investigate prisoner-guard conflict in a simulated prison environment.
What is a confederate?
A researcher or other person who is acting in a study but does not know what the study is about.
Social influence research often uses laboratory-based experiments.
Explain one limitation of a laboratory-based experiment into social influence.
As the laboratory is an artificial setting the research will lack mundane realism as it is not like real life.
Therefore, the findings may not generalise to settings other than the laboratory.
So the research may not represent real-life social influence.
Suggest an appropriate way to overcome the limitation of laboratory-based experiment into social influence.
Use a field instead of a laboratory experiment which means you can still manipulate the variables, but the research can be conducted in a natural setting.
This then means that the study has ecological validity.
Name the personality type proposed by Adorno.
Authoritarian personality.
Identify whether the following statement represents internal or external locus of control.
“People’s misfortunes are due to the mistakes they make.”
Internal locus of control.
Jagdeep is in her local shopping centre and her mum has just called to say she needs to come home quickly.
Jagdeep sees a woman fall over in the centre of the walkway.
Nobody goes to help, including Jagdeep. Once Jagdeep arrives home she tells her mum that she helped the woman.
Assess Jagdeep’s behaviour using two areas of Psychology that you have studied.
There are a number of explanations for Jagdeep’s behaviour from the areas of social influence and memory.
Jagdeep is showing conformity.
Conformity is a type of social influence, when an individual follows the majority of people in a social situation; although the individual may behave differently when they are on their own.
Jagdeep may have felt other people in the shopping centre would have helped so she did not assume personal responsibility to help.
This is a situational factor called diffusion of responsibility where an individual is unwilling to take personal responsibility for an emergency.
Nobody in the shopping centre helped the woman so Jagdeep could be conforming to the majority.
Psychological research into bystander intervention conducted by Piliavin et al (1969) found that 90% of people who helped either the person with a cane or the person who was drunk were male, which supports Jagdeep not helping as she is female and so less likely to help.
In addition, Jagdeep had been given a direct order from her mother to go home and she did so, which shows obedience.
Jagdeep obeyed her mother which is similar to participant obedience in a study where they obeyed an experimenter who they believed had legitimacy of authority.
Secondly, there may be an issue regarding Japdeep’s memory of the events at the shopping centre. Attention and rehearsal is required for events to be transferred from the short-term memory to long-term memory. Jagdeep may not have rehearsed the events fully and so did not correctly recall that she did not help the woman. Peterson and Peterson (1959) showed that prevention of rehearsal led to the loss of more than 90% of material, which could be the case with Jagdeep. However, Peterson and Peterson (1959) conducted a laboratory experiment and this research method lacks ecological validity, so Japdeep’s behaviour may be better explained by bystander intervention.
Where did Piliavin’s study take place?
A. Paris
B. Tokyo
C. New York
D. London
C. New York
What was Piliavin’s study an example of?
A. Laboratory Experiment
B. Field Experiment
C. Observation
D. Case Study
B. Field Experiment
When we feel we have personal control over our own behaviour we have a…
A. external locus of control
B. internal locus of control
C. an authoritarian personality
D. type 2 personality
B. internal locus of control
Which university did Milgram conduct his studies?
A. Stanford
B. Princeton
C. Yale
D. Brown
C. Yale
Which university did Zimbardo conduct his studies?
Correct! A. Stanford B. Princeton C. Brown D. Yale
A. Stanford
