Social Influence Flashcards
Obedience
Individuals respond to direct order from someone with authority, rules or laws of society.
Compliance
Changing behaviour in response to a request to do so. Does not necessarily involve authority figures
Milgram Experiment
Investigated factors involved in determining obedience to authority figures
Internal factors
Caused by something within the person (personality)
Ethics with Milgram
Psychological harm (emotional strain), right to withdraw (encouraged to stay), deception (told they had equal chance of being teacher and learner, not aware of true nature of study)
External factors
Caused by something outside the person (situation)
Factors influencing obedience
Proximity to authority figure, prestige of authority figure, deindividuation
Stanford Prison experiment
Zimbardo investigated if brutality reported among guards in American prisons was due to personalities of guards or the environment.
Insight from Zimbardo’s prison experiment
Situational factors play a significant role in behaviours exhibited compared to dispositional.
Ethics with Zimbardo
Physical & psychological harm, voluntary participation (paid), informed consent (fake arrest), right to withdraw (questioned and called weak if left), debriefing (happened several years later)
Conformity
Individuals yield to groups pressures
3 types of conformity
Compliance, identification and internalisation
Compliance
Publicly change behaviour to be like majority.
Don’t change minds in private.
Short-term
Identification
Take on views of individuals or groups we admire.
Publicly change behaviour and private beliefs.
Short-term
Internalisation
Others convince us their beliefs are right and behaviour adjusts accordingly.
Behaviour and thoughts change publicly and privately.
Long-term
Normative social influence (NSI)
Conform to be accepted or belong.
Socially rewarding/avoids social punishment.
Compliance or identification
Informational social influence (ISI)
Conform to gain knowledge or believe someone else is right.
Adopt new belief system.
Internalisation
Factors affecting comformity
Size of group, difficulty of task, answer in private, status of majority group, unanimity, anonymity
Ethocentric bias
An individual is culturally biased toward their own culture.
Can’t examine other ethnic groups without comparing to their own.
Ethocentric
Viewing other ethnic or cultural groups through the lense of ones own
Ethical implications: Indigenous communities
Review process, assessment or advice must be given from networks with knowledge of research with Indigenous people.