Social Influence Flashcards
What is Conformity?
it is a change in a person’s behaviour or opinions as result of real or imagined pressure from a person or group of people
what are the type of conformity?
compliance, identification and internalisation
What is compliance?
A superficial and temporary type conformity where we outwardly go along with the majority view, but privately disagree with it. The change in our behaviour only lasts as long as the group is present.
What is identification
A moderate type of conformity where we act in the same way as the group because we value it and want to be part of it. this identification may mean we publicly change our opinions, even if we don’t privately agree
What is internalisation?
A deep type of conformity where we take on the majority view because we accept it as correct. It leads to a far reaching and permanent change in behaviour even when the group is absent.
What are the explanations of conformity?
Informational Social influence (ISI) and Normative Social influence (NSI)
what is ISI
we conform because we want to be right.
when we don’t know what the right or wrong thing is to do, we look to others/the majority who we think are likely to be right.
it is a cognitive process that results in internalisation.
what is NSI
we conform because we like to follow norms - to do what is seen as ‘normal’ within a particular social group.
we don’t like to appear foolish & prefer to gain social approval rather than to be rejected.
it’s an emotional process which results in compliance
What is Asch’s baseline procedure
123 Male students took part in the study, they believed they were taking part in a vision study. Asch uses a line judgement task where he placed one real naive participant in a room with seven confederates, who had agreed their answers in advance. in turn each person had to say out loud what line was most like the target line in length. the correct answer was always obvious. each participant completed 18 trials and the confederates gave the same incorrect answer on 12 trials, called critical trials. Asch wanted to see whether the real participant would conform to the majority view, even when the answer was clearly incorrect.
Asch measured the number of times each naive participant conformed to the majority view.
What is Asch’s baseline findings
On average, the naive participants conformed to the majority view 36.8% of the time
75% of the participants conformed on at least one critical trial.
25% of the participants never conformed.
What are Asch’s variations
Group size, unanimity and task difficulty
Explain Asch’s variation of group size
Asch varied the number of confederates from 1-15.
conformity increased with increasing confederates but only up to 3.
with 3 confederates, conformity to the wrong answer rose to 31.8%, but the addition of further confederates made little difference.
shows that only a small majority is needed for people to conform to group pressure.
Explain Asch’s variation of unanimity
Asch introduced a confederate who disagreed with the others.
conformity was reduced by a quarter from the level it was when the majority was unanimous (ppt conformed less often).
the presence of a dissenter enabled the naive ppt to behave more independently.
if the majority isn’t unanimous we are less likely to conform.
Explain Asch’s variation of task difficulty
Asch made the task harder by making the comparison lines closer in length to the standard line.
conformity increased under these conditions.
this suggests that ISI plays a greater role when the task becomes harder - when the ppt is not sure of the right answer, they look to the others for guidance.
Weaknesses of Asch’s research - Mundane realisism
- the task & situation were artificial
judging the length of a line is a trivial task that has no consequences, but in real life our decisions about whether to conform are more complex & have consequences.
in addition, ppts were aware they were in a research study & may have guessed that it was on conformity, therefore displaying demand characteristics when deciding whether or not to conform.
this is a limitation because it means that the findings do not generalise to everyday situations because the study doesn’t not resemble real life conformity.
