Social influence

Question 1

What is conformity?

Answer 1

when a person public and private attitude have been influenced by majority.

• this can be a change in attitude or forming a new attitude for the first time.

Question 2

what is compliance?

Answer 2

type of conformity where a person publicly conforms but not privately to be accepted by a group and avoid social rejection
- WEAK TYPE

Question 3

what is identification?

Answer 3

type of conformity, where a person publicly and privately conforms.

• they look up to someone
• but attitudes and behaviours aren’t long lasting.
• MEDIUM

Question 4

what is internalisation?

Answer 4

publicly and privately agree because they believe the majority are correct and their attitude and behaviours are long lasting.

• STRONG

Question 5

Zimbardo study

1. what is aim of Zimbardo study?
2. what did he find?
3. what did he concluded

Answer 5

1. to investigate if prison brutality is because of guards and prisoners’ personality or because they are conforming to social roles.

• he found that normal average men turned to brutality when they were assigned new social roles
• he concluded that prison brutality is caused by social roles.

Question 6

what is evaluation for Zimbardo study

3 criticism and also response.

Answer 6

1st criticism
people said that Zimbardo study was unethical for 2 reasons
1. psychological harm - participants became distressed
2. no informed consent - participants were not told what they were getting themselves into

Zimbardo response: lack of awareness, Zimbardo himself did not know the experiment was going to get out of hand.

2. criticism : lack of generalisability. Zimbardo only recruited white middle class men so you can’t generalise it to the whole population

Zimbardo response: experiment shows examples of brutality in the real world. suggesting his results can be generalised.

3rd criticism: lack of ecological validity. because the participants knew they were taking part in the study maybe the change their behaviour.

Zimbardo response: participants did act like it was real they had real emotional reactions.

Question 7

What are 3 SITUTATIONAL variables that affect conformity

Answer 7

1. group size : when size of the majority is bigger, the size of the influence is bigger which makes people more likely to conform. when size of group is smaller people are less likely to conform because less social pressure to conform.
2. unamity = as unamity of group increases conformity increases as there is more social pressure to conform because everyone agrees on one thing. however, when unamity of group decreases conformity also decreases as less social pressure to conform because someone else agrees with you.
3. task difficulty= when task is more difficult or solution to something is less obvious people are more likely to confrom.

Question 8

what are 2 explanations for conformity?

Answer 8

1. normative = normal, they want to be liked and accepted. people do want is considered normal, so they are accepted by group. leads to compliance
2. informational = people conform because they unsure or they can’t think so we look at the majority because we think they are likely to be correct. leads to internalisation.

Question 9

Asch study

1. what was aim?
2. what procedure?
3. what did he find?
4. what did he conclude?

Answer 9

1. to see if people will conform to majority even if the majority were wrong.
2. he asked participants to judge line lengths in presence of confederates who gave the wrong answer
   he checked whether the answers really were easy by having a control group who just had to give their answers privately.
3. found 75% conformed at least once.
   32% conformity rate overall.
4. Participant were conforming to fit in with majority and that their behaviour was explained through normative social influence.

Question 10

Asch evaluation
what are 3 criticism and 3 responses to each criticism

Answer 10

1. lacked ecological validity = you can’t generalise Asch study to the conformity you would encounter in real life. in this case participants may have conformed more because there are no consequences

response: lab experiment control extraneous variables. in Asch study he was able to control like time of day, lines of the participants and amount of time the confederates could speak. so, he could establish cause and effect relationships.

2. demand characteristics = participants may have realised confederates were lying and may have only pretended to conform because they thought that was what they were supposed to do.

response = he conducted interviews after the study, and he asked participant why they conformed. they had 3 reasons: because they don’t want social rejection, because they couldn’t see properly and weren’t sure about, they were right.

3. ignored individual variables. overall conformity rate was 32% whilst participants did conform not all of them conformed. this suggests some people are more likely to conform than others because of indivual differences.

response: 75% of people conformed once suggesting that urge to conform is still strong and there were other studies that replicated and there were similar findings on the rate of conformity.