Social Influence 👯♀️ Flashcards
What is conformity?
Conformity is a type of social influence that describes how a person changes their attitude or behaviour in response to group pressure.
What are the 3 types of conformity?
- Compliance
- Identification
- Internalisation
What is Compliance?
A person changes their public behaviour (the way they act) but not their personal beliefs. This is usually a short term change and is often the result of normative social influence (NSI).
Eg. Your friends like rock music so you act like you do but you really don’t.
What is Identification?
A person changes their public behaviour and their private beliefs, but only while they are in the presence of the group. This is usually a short-term change and the result of normative social influence (NSI).
Eg. your friends being vegetarian and therefore you are too, but alone you eat meat.
What is Internalisation?
A person changes their public behaviour and their private beliefs. This is usually a long-term change and often the result of informational social influence (ISI).
Eg. Person meets a Buddhist group and therefore is influenced to convert to this faith, they will continue to practice it without the presence of the group as they have internalised this belief.
What are the 2 explanations why people conform? Explain.
- Normative Social Influence (NSI)
— When a person conforms to be accepted and to feel that they belong to the group
— They conform because it is socially rewarding, or to avoid social rejection
— Associated with compliance and identification - Informational Social Influence (ISI)
— When a person conforms to gain knowledge, or because they believe that someone else is ‘right’
— Associated with internalisation
EVALUATION : types of conformity
RESEARCH SUPPORT : ASCH (1956)
P: One strength of both informational and normative social influence is that there is research to support for their role in conformity.
E: Asch (1956), investigated if individuals would conform to the group even when they knew the group was incorrect in which 75% conformed at least once.
E: After the experiment, Ach interviewed participants to find out why they conformed and found that some participants conformed because they did not want to be rejected by the group (NSI) whilst others conformed because they believed the group was right and they were wrong (ISI).
L: Therefore, this study provides evidence for the idea that people will conform to the group to be right or to fit in, supporting both ISI and NSI as explanations.
INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN ISI
P: A limitation of the ISI explanation of conformity is that there are individual differences in how people behave.
E: Research by Perrin and Spencer (1980) conducted an experiment similar to Asch’s but this time using engineering students in the UK.
E: As these students were experts in their field, it is possible that they were confident that they were right when completing the task, meaning that they would not look to anybody else for guidance.
L: Therefore, the ISI explanation on conformity is limited as it does not apply to all individuals in all situations, where an individuals may be an expert for example, meaning that it cannot explain fully why people conform.
REAL WORLD APPLICATIONS FOR NSI
P: A strength of NSI is that there is real world applications that demonstrate it occurs beyond the artificial laboratory setting.
E: Shultz et al. (2008) gathered data from many hotels over a week where guests were allocated to rooms randomly as either control or experimental conditions. In the control rooms, there was a door hanger informing the participants of the environmental benefits of reusing towels. In the experimental condition, there was additional information stating that ‘75% of guests chose to reuse their towels each day’
E: The results showed that in comparison to the control group, guests who received an additional message, that contained normative information about other guests, reduced their need for fresh towels by 25%
L: This shows that they have conformed in order to ‘fit in’ with the perceived group behaviour proving NSI exists in the real world setting.
RESEARCH SUPPORT FOR ISI
P: A strength of ISI is that it is supported by research evidence.
E: Lucas et al. (2006) asked students to answer mathematical problems and found that conformity to incorrect answers was higher when the questions were difficult than when they were easy. this was most true for students who rated their maths ability as poor.
E: This study therefore shows that people conform in situations where they don’t know the answer, as they assume other people must be right.
L: This therefore supports ISI as it shows individuals conform as they want to be right.
What is the procedure of Asch’s research?
—> Asch (1951)
Aim : To examine the extent to which social pressure to conform from unanimous majority affects conformity in an unambiguous situation.
Method:
1. Asch’s sample consisted of 123 male American undergraduate students, who believed they were taking part in a vision test.
2. Asch used a line judgement task, where he placed one real (naive) participant in a room with 6-8 confederates (actors working on the behalf of the experimenter), who had agreed their answers in advance.
3. The naive participant was deceived and was led to believe that the other people were also real participants. The participant was seated second to last.
4. In turn, each person said out their answer, the correct answer was always obvious. Each participant completed 18 trials and the confederates gave the same incorrect answer on 12 trials, these were called ‘critical trials’.
Asch wanted to see if the participant would conform to the majority view even when the answer was clearly incorrect.
Results: Asch measured the number of times each participant conformed to the majority view. On average, the real participants conformed to the incorrect answers on 32% of the critical trials. 74% of the participants conformed on at leats one critical trial and 26% never conformed.
Conclusion: Asch interviewed his participants after the experiment to find out why they conformed. Most of them said that they knew their answers were incorrect, but they went along with the group to ‘fit in’, or because they thought they’d be ridiculed. This confirms that participants complied due to normative social influence and the desire the fit in publicly without changing their private viewpoint.
EVALUATION : Asch’s research
ETHICAL ISSUES
P: One limitation of Asch’s research is that there are ethical issues.
E: The British Psychological Society outlines six guidelines all psychology research must follow in order to be considered ethical, including informed consent, deception, protection from harm, right to withdraw, debriefing and right to anonymity.
E: In Asch’s study, participants were told they were participating in investigation into visual perception, whereas in reality they were being studied on whether they conformed to the group. This breaks the guidelines of no deception, as participants were not told the truth, and informed consent, as participants were not informed of the true aim of the study.
L: Therefore, Asch’s study can be considered as limited due to the ethical problems it exposed participants to.
REAL WORLD APPLICATION
P: One strength of Asch’s research is its application to real life situations.
E: For example, research has shown that in over 95% of cases, the first vote of the jury determines the final verdict.
E: This is a strength for Asch’s study, as by understanding the situations in which individuals conform, we can apply this knowledge to a wide range of scenarios.
L: Therefore one strength of Asch’s study is its application to real-life.
LACKS TEMPORAL VALIDITY
P: A final limitation of Asch’s study is that it lacks temporal validity.
E: Perrin and Spencer (1980) repeated Asch’s study in the UK and found that when using students, there was only one conforming response out of 396 trials. However, when they used youths on probation as participants and probation officers as confederates, they found similar levels of conformity to Asch.
E: this indicates that the perceived costs of conforming may affect an individual’s likelihood to conform. In this tie which Asch’s study was conducted, McCarthyism was high in America, and there was therefore risks of being associated with not conforming to the group, which may explain why Asch’s conformity rates were so high.
L: Therefore, Asch’s study is limited as we cannot apply it to other time periods than the one it was conducted in due to the specific circumstances in which it took place.
CULTURAL DIFFERENCES
P: A limitation of Asch’s research is that there are cultural differences in conformity rates around the world.
E: Smith et al. (2006) investigated cultural differences in conformity through a meta-analysis and found that on average conformity was 31.2%, however when comparing collectivist and individualist cultures, key differences were found. Individualist cultures were found to have a conformity rate of 25%, whereas collectivist cultures were found to have a conformity rate of 37% which is nearer to what Asch originally found.
E: This is a problem for Asch’s study as it shows that we cannot generalise his findings to other cultures outside the USA, as this would be an imposed ethic. Later research has shown that Asch’s study is not an accurate representation of conformity in all cultures.
L: Therefore, one limitation of Asch’s study is that it is only an indication of conformity rates in the US and cannot be generalised to other cultures.
What are the 3 variations of Asch’s study which influenced conformity levels?
- Group size
- Unanimity
- Task difficulty
How does group size affect conformity levels?
Asch carried out different variations to determine how the size of the majority affects the rate of conformity, these variation ranged from 1-15 confederates and the level of conformity varied drastically.
With 1 confederate = 3% conformity on critical trials
With 2 confederates = 13% conformity on critical trials
With 3 confederates = 32% conformity on critical trials (the same percentage as his original experiment in which there was 3-8 confederates.
— This demonstrates that conformity reaches its highest level with just 3 confederates, once a majority pressure is created.
In the condition where he used 15 confederates the conformity slightly dropped yet it’s possible that it’s due to real participants becoming suspicious and not because of genuine conformity.
How does unanimity affect levels of conformity?
Unanimity refers to the extent that members of a majority agree with one another.
In Asch’s original experiment, the confederates all gave the same incorrect answer on critical trials.
— In one variation of Asch’s experiment, one of the confederates was instructed to give the correct answer throughout. In this variation, the conformity dropped to 5%.
— This demonstrates that if the real participant has support for their belief, then they are more likely to resist the pressure to conform.
In another variation where a confederate gave a different, still incorrect, answer the conformity significantly dropped, not as much, to 9%.
— This shows that if you break or disrupt the groups unanimous position, then conformity is reduced significantly, even if the answer provided by the supporter is still incorrect.
How does task difficulty affect the extent of conformity?
In Asch’s original experiment, the correct answer was always obvious. In one of his variations he made the task more difficult, by making the difference between the one lengths smaller and therefore appear closer together and more ambiguous.
— In this variation, Asch found the rate of conformity increased, although he didn’t report the percentage. This is likely to be the result of informational social influence, as individuals look to another for guidance when undertaking an ambiguous task.
What is the meant by ‘conformity to social roles’?
When an individual adopts a particular behaviour and belief, while in a particular social situation.
Eg. At school your teacher adopt the behaviour and beliefs of a ‘teacher’, which may be very different to the behaviour and beliefs they adopt with their friends at the weekend.
— This type of conformity represents identification where a person changes their public behaviour and private beliefs but only while they are in a particular social role.
What did research did Zimbardo (1973) conduct?
Zimbardo (1973) conducted an extremely controversial study on conformity to social roles called the Stanford Prision Experiment (SPE).
Explain the Stanford Prison Experiment.
AIM: To examine whether people would conform to the social roles of a prison guard or prisoner when places in a mock prison environment. Furthermore, he wanted to examine whether the behaviour displayed in prisons was due to internal dispositional factors, the people themselves, or external situational factors, the environment and conditions of the prison.
METHOD:
1. Zimbardo’s sample consisted of 21 male university students who volunteered in response to a newspaper advert. The participants were selected from 75 volunteers on the basis of their physical and mental stability and were each paid $15 a day to take part.
2. Each participant was randomly assigned to one of two roles, prisoner or guard.
— Zimbardo wanted to make the experience as realistic as possible, turning the basement of Stanford Prison into a prison. Additionally, the ‘prisoners’ were arrested by real local police and fingerprinted, stripped and given a numbered uniform with chains placed around their ankles.
— The guarded were given uniforms, dark reflective sunglasses, handcuffs and a truncheon. They were intricate red to run the prison without using physical violence.
— The experiment was set to run for 2 weeks.
RESULTS: Zimbardo found that both the prisoners and guards quickly identifies with their social roles. Within days the prisoners rebelled, but this was quickly crushed by the guard, who then grew increasingly abusive towards the prisoners.
The guards dehumanised the prisoners, waking them during the night and forcing them to clean the toilets with their bar hands; prisoners became increasingly submissive, identifying further with their subordinate role.
Five of the prisoners were released from the experiment early, because of their adverse reactions to the physical and mental torment eg. Crying and extreme anxiety. Although the experiment was set to run for two weeks, it was terminated after six days.
CONCLUSION: Zimbardo concluded that people quickly conform to social roles, even when the role goes against their moral principles. Furthermore, he concluded that situational factors were largely responsible for the behaviour found, as none of the participants had ever demonstrated these behaviours previously.
EVALUATION: Zimbardo’s SPE
INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES
P: Zimbardo believed that conformity to roles was an automatic behaviour. This is, the guards’ sadistic behaviour was an automatic consequence of them embracing their roles, which in turn suppressed their ability to understand or see what they were doing was wrong.
E: Not all the guards responded in the same way. behaviour varied from fully sadistic to being ‘good’ guards. The ‘good’ guards did not degrade or harass the prisoners, and even did small favours for them like bringing in cigarettes.
L: Haslam and Reicher (2012) argue that this shows that the guards chose how to behave, rather than blindly conforming to their social role, showing individual differences in behaviour.
DEMAND CHARACTERISTICS
P: Banuazizi and Movahedi (1975) presented some of the details of the SPE experimental procedure to a large sample of students who had never heard of the study. The vast majority of these students correctly guessed the purpose/aim of the experiment, and correctly predicted the outcome.
E: Perhaps, the participants of the SPE guessed what the experimenters expected of them or how they wanted them to behave, and so behaved in a way to please them.
L: Therefore, the behaviour in Zimbardo’s guards and prisoners may not be due to their response to a ‘compelling prison environment’ but rather it was a response to powerful demand characteristics in the experimental situation itself.
REAL WORLD APPLICATION
P: Abu Ghraib was a military prison in Iraq, notorious for the torture and abuse of Iraqi prisoners by US soldiers in 2003 and 2004. Zimbardo’s believed that the guards who committed the abuses were victims of situational factors that made abuse more likely.
E: He suggests that situational factors such as lack of training, unrelenting boredom and no accountability ro higher authority were present in both the SPE and Abu Ghraib.
E: These, combined with an opportunity to misuse the power associated with the assigned role of the ‘guard; let to the prisoner abuses in both situations.
L: Therefore, this research has real-world application as it has helped us to understand how seemingly normal people can behave in atrocious ways when they are conforming to social roles.
ETHICAL
P: Zimbardo’s study was considered ethical because it followed the guidelines of the Stanford University ethics committee that has approved it.
E: There was, for example, no deception with all participants being told in advance that many of their usual rights would be suspended.
E: However, Zimbardo acknowledges that perhaps the study should have been stopped earlier as so many of the participants were experiencing emotional distress. Also, while participants did consent to take part, they did not consent to being arrested at their own homes.
L: He attempted to make amends for this by carrying out debriefing sessions for several years afterwards and concluded that there were no lasting negative effects.
What is obedience?
Obedience is a form of social influence that is in direct response to an order from another person.
