Social Influence Flashcards
What are situational variables?
-> qualities of the environment that influence levels of conformity -> influence over the degree to which individuals conform
-> these include: group size -> the number of members within a social group
-> unanimity -> to what degree the group members are in agreement with each other
-> task difficulty -> how obvious the correct answer/ decision is when regarding a task
-> Asch performed several variations of his procedure -> investigated these factors
What are individual variables?
-> personal characteristics that affect the degree to which individuals yield to group pressures
What is size of a group?
-> conformity rates increase as the size of a majority influence increases
-> there comes a point -> further increases in the size of a majority doesn’t lead to further increases in conformity
What is A03 research supporting the size of a group?
-> Asch -> one real participant and one confederate and conformity was low
-> 13 % -> two confederates and 32% with three confederates -> same rate as the original study
-> adding 15 confederates had no effect on the overall conformity
What is further A03 research supporting size of a group -> Bond and Smith?
-> performing a meta analysis of 133 Asch type studies from seventeen countries -> the findings were that conformity peaks with about four or five confederates
-> There is contradictory research. Gerard questioned this -> conformity rates do rise as more confederates are added -> it was found that conformity rates do rise as mire confederates are added -> the rate of increase declines with each additional confederate.
What is further A03 research supporting the size of a group? -> Pike and Laland
-> Pike and Laland -> gave support to Gerard by reporting -> stickleback fish demonstrated conformity to feeding behaviour by showing an increased level of copying of a demonstrator fish eating at a food rich site -> rate of conformity declined as the number of demonstrator fish increased -> suggests an evolutionary basis to conformity due to its survival value
What is unanimity and the Asch’s research supporting it?
-> CR -> decline -> majority influence not unanimous
->important factor -> reduction in the majority’s agreement -> rather than an individual being given support for their opinions
-> conformity drops if a rebel goes against the majority who don’t support the rebel’s viewpoint
-> Asch -> one confederate went against the other confederates -> 32% to 5.5%
-> rebel went against both the other confederates and the real ppt -> conformity -> drop -> 9%
What is task difficulty?
-> greater conformity rates -> task difficulty increases -> right answer becomes less obvious -> individuals would look to others for guidance as to what the correct response is -> suggests ISI is the dominant force
-> Asch -> increased task difficulty -> comparison lines similar to each other -> ppt more likely to conform to wrong answers -> thus demonstrating the effect of task difficulty on conformity.
What is the aim of Asch’s research?
-> testing conformity to obviously incorrect answers
-> research like Jenness was criticised -> only involved ambiguous tasks and uncertain situations
-> to investigate the degree to which individuals would conform to a majority who gave obviously wrong answers
What is the procedure of Asch’s research?
-> 123 American male student volunteers -> study -> visual perception -> individual participants -> groups with seven and nine others -> sat in a line or around the table -> in reality pseudo participants -> confederates
-> task was to say which comparison line A,B,C was the same as the stimulus line on 18 different trials
-> 12 of these were critical trials -> pseudo participants gave identical wrong answers -> the naïve (real) participant always answered last or last but one
-> control group of 36 participants -> tested individually on 20 trials -> to test how accurate individual judgements were
What were the findings of Asch’s research?
-> the control group -> error rate of only 0.04% -> 3 mistakes out of 720 trials -> shows how obvious the correct answers were
-> on 12 of the critical trials -> 32% conformity rate to wrong answers
-> 75% participants conformed to at least one wrong answer -> this means that 25% never conformed
-> 5% conformed to all 12 wrong answers
-> post experiment interviews found three reasons for conformity:
-> distortion of action -> the majority of participants who conformed did so publicly but not privately -> they wished to avoid ridicule
-> distortion of perception -> some participants believed perception must actually be wrong and so conformed
-> distortion of judgement -> some participants had doubts concerning the accuracy of their judgements and so conformed to the majority view
What were the conclusions of Asch’s research?
-> judgements of individuals are affected by majority opinions -> even when the majority are obviously wrong
-> big individual differences in the amount to which people are affected by majority influence -> most participants conformed publicly -> but not privately -> motivated by normative social influence -> where individuals conform to gain acceptance or avoid rejection by a group
