Social influence

Question 1

What is conformity?

Answer 1

When an individual changes their behavior or thinking due to group pressure.

Question 2

What is the aim of aschs study?

Answer 2

Aim- asch set out an experiment to see how people respond to group pressure. He chose to test this in a situation where the answers are clearly wrong (unambiguous) to see if people are influenced by what other individuals think.

Question 3

What is the Method of aschs study

Answer 3

123 participants who were American students (all men). These participants were called naive since they didn’t know the aims of the study.
They were shown 2 large cards. One with a single black line, and the other with 3 comparison lines.

There were 18 trials. The first trials the confederates gave the correct answers. Last 12 trials, they gave the wrong answers.

Question 4

What is the result and conclusion of aschs study?

Answer 4

N.P- naive participants
Results: On the 12 trials that the confederates gave the wrong answers in, the N.P have also given a wrong answer 36.8% of the time. 25% of N.P never conformed. 75% N.P. conformed at least once. 100-25=75

Conclusion: The results show that peoples thinking are influenced by group pressure, Some N.P show high levels of independence, since they can resist the pressure to conform.

Question 5

Evaluation of aschs study (9marker)

Answer 5

Weakness- Results are only relevant to the 1950’s America(lacks validity). 1950’s were a conformist time in America. The N.P were scared to behave differently from the majority because of the movement that was being done which aimed to identify anyone with communist tendencies.
Weakness- The task and situation is artificial. The N.P were asked to judge the length of a line with a group of strangers, which doesn’t reflect everyday situations where people conform. It was a trivial task so there is no reason why people wouldn’t conform. This means that the results may not generalise to everyday situations.
Strength- asch used a replicable procedure which means that the procedure could be repeated many times to check for reliability. Experimenters/psychologists are able to repeat this procedure and check for validity and compare the data they have gotten with the original research study.

Question 6

Explain Conformity mentioning the social and dispositional factors.

Answer 6

Dispositional factors- When individuals conform because they have a conformist personality and are less confident.
Social factors- Individuals conform because they feel a sense of pressure from their surroundings.

Question 7

How does social factors affect conformity?

Answer 7

Group size- The greater the group size people are in, the greater the pressure to conform. Adding more confederates, made the participants feel more of a sense of pressure due to more people.

Anonymity- Being anonymous tends to reduce conformity, because it reduces people’s desire to be accepted and pressure.When we are not identifiable, we also no longer have the fear of consequences for our actions. participants in aschs study have said they conformed because they did not want to be rejected from the rest of the group.

Task difficulty- As the difficulty of the task increases, the answer becomes less certain, so people would then conform because they’re not sure what the right answer is. and they think that they will get the wrong answer if they don’t conform, causing them to conform for the “right” answer.

Question 8

What are the dispositional factors that affect conformity?

Answer 8

Personality- Research has found that some personality characteristics influence the likelihood to conform. People with low IQ levels, low self esteem and low status in a group tend to think that people around them have a better understanding of how to behave and think, so they look for guidance from others since they can’t trust their own judgment, which increases conformity.

Expertise-
People with greater expertise tend to be less conformist. They’re more confident in their opinions because they tend to have more experience. Research study has shown that people who rated themselves good at maths were less likely to conform since they were confident, others who were less confident had higher conformity rates.

Question 9

What is Obedience

Answer 9

A type of social influence that causes individuals to act in a certain way because of orders from a figure of authority.

Question 10

What is the agency theory?

Answer 10

When a person acts as an agent for someone else. They act as an agent because they assume the person giving the orders is taking responsibility.
A person can either be in an-
Agentic state- Where an individual is acting on behalf of someone else and they feel no personal responsibility for their actions.
Autonomous state- When a person will only act/behave according to their own principles and they feel personal responsibility for their actions.

Question 11

What is Authority and how does it affect obedience and refer to to the term agentic shift-

Answer 11

Authority is The right to give orders and expect obedience. Agentic shift is the change from an autonomous state to a Agentic state, milgram mentioned that this change occurs due to a person perceiving someone else as a figure of authority. When one person is in charge, people shift from having an autonomous state into having an Agentic state.

Question 12

What are the factors of milgrams agency theory that affect obedience?

Answer 12

Agency, authority, culture, and proximity.

Question 13

Culture- the social hierarchy and how it affects obedience

Answer 13

Culture refers to someone’s set of beliefs and expectations.
Obedience towards authority figures is culturally transmitted to individuals, since it is taught via the cultural and societal norms as part of someone’s upbringing.
Most cultures operate a social hierarchy in which authority figures occupy the highest positions and expect to be obeyed.

Question 14

What is proximity and how does it affect obedience?

Answer 14

Proximity is how near or far something or someone is from you.
Obedience is easily achieved if the person you’re harming is out of sight.
If you have an up close and personal view of the person you’re harming then you would be more likely to feel uncomfortable, distressed, upset. Because the closer someone is to you, the more difficult it is to follow orders to harm them.
Participants in milgrams study would find it more difficult to harm people with electric shocks if they were close to them.

Question 15

Distinguish between obedience and conformity-

Answer 15

Conformity and obedience are both types of social influence. However, Conformity is when you change your behavior and thinking due to group pressure. obedience is when you act in response due to a direct order from a figure of authority.

Question 16

What is the authoritarian personality-

Answer 16

Are people who would be far more likely to obey individuals with a figure of authority. They tend to be submissive to people with a higher status, and dismissive to inferiors. They have a rigid cognitive style and have experienced harsh parenting.

Question 17

What are two ethical issues to consider to the study of obedience?

Answer 17

Protection from harm- If you ask the participants to put themselves in a position in which goes against their wishes then they’ll feel uncomfortable and distressed.
Participants may have not wanted to obey orders but may have done so because they felt pressured.

Right to withdraw- important ethical issue to consider in the study due to participants being able to have an ‘escape route’ from any procedure/task that they find unpleasant and uncomfortable for them to do.

Question 18

What are the dispositional factors that affects adornos theory of obedience?

Answer 18

Cognitive style, originates from childhood, scape goating

Question 19

How does cognitive style affect obedience?

Answer 19

C.S refers to the way a person thinks about the world. authoritarian people tend to have a particular way of thinking.
Tend to have black and white opinions.
They see the world in a rigid and inflexible way and tend to have rigid stereotypes.
This thinking in authoritarian people is called rigid cognitive style.

Question 20

How does originating in childhood affect obedience?

Answer 20

Adorno mentioned that authoritarian personality develops when a child experiences overly strict parenting. The child’s parents will exert strong discipline over the child and are very critical with the child’s behavior. The parents will expect loyalty and have high standards of achievement. The parents will offer conditional love if the child were to behave correctly.
Adorno mentioned that the child will learn these behaviours and attitudes and eventually develop authoritarian personality.

Question 21

How does scapegoating affect obedience?

Answer 21

People with authoritarian personality tend to feel anger and resentment and so will take these feelings of hostility out on lower status people (socially inferior people) basically they will displace their anger on something/someone else.

Question 22

Evaluate adornos theory of the authoritarian personality-

Answer 22

People with Authoritarian personality tend to have a different and particular way of thinking, they tend to have black and white thinking. People develop authoritarian personality due to experiencing overly strict parenting, their parents exerted strong discipline over them and were very critical over their behavior. People with A.P tend to look down on individuals who are socially inferior, but tend to obey authority figures.

A weakness is that Adorno based his theory on his research that uses the F- Scale. The f scale was criticized since it contained a response bias. Since the questions were structured in a way in which giving a yes answer would be an authoritarian response. This challenges the validity of the theory since it is based on Poor evidence.
Another weakness is that Adorno has not found proof that authoritarian personality causes high levels of obedience. He has only found a correlation between personality type and obedience. So cause and effect cannot be proved.

Another weakness is that researchers have found the people with low educational levels tend to be more obedient. This shows that dispositional factors may be important and personality type is not enough on its own since it cannot explain all cases of obedience.

Question 23

What is the aim of piliavins subway study?

Answer 23

Piliavin wanted to investigate bystander behaviour in a more natural setting. They also wanted to find out if certain characteristics of the victim will affect if the victim receives help or not.

Question 24

What is the method of piliavins subway study?

Answer 24

A team of 4 student researchers boarded a New York City subway train always at the same stop.
103 trials.
One member of the team played the role of the victim. (always male student)
Victim stood next to a pole in the center of the critical area in the subway carriage. After 70 secs, he pretended to collapse and remained on the floor until help was forthcoming.
38 trials the victim smelled like alcohol and carried a bottle of alc in a brown bag.
65 trials the victim carried a black cane and appeared sober (disabled condition)
2 of the student researchers were observers, they noted when people would offer help and what the people did.
4th member of the team would offer help to the victim after 70 to 150 secs if no one stepped in to help.

Question 25

What is the results of the piliavins subway study?

Answer 25

When the member appeared as a disabled individual, he was helped 95% of the trials, when he appeared drunk he would be helped 50% of the trials.

(first 70 seconds, disabled victim was helped 87% of the time)
(First 70 seconds, drunk victim would be helped 17% of the time)
So Help was offered faster in the disabled condition

Question 26

What is the conclusion of the subway study?

Answer 26

The characteristics of the victim affects whether the victim receives help or not.
In a natural setting the number of people who witness the emergency does not affect on their willingness to help.

Question 27

Evaluate piliavins subway study- (9marker)

Answer 27

State the aim, method, results, conclusion

One strength of this study is that the participants were not aware that their behaviour was being studied. The study took place in a subway train, and all the participants (the passengers) did not know they were taking part in a psychology study, so their actions and behaviour was true to life and not artificial. This increases the validity of the results.
One weakness of the study is that the people that were being studied were mainly people who lived in the city. The sample of the participants was large but it had unique characteristics. All the participants sampled were comfortable in an urban environment, and they were probably used to seeing emergency situations in the city such as someone being injured or beggars, so these passengers are used to ignoring someone in need. This means that the helping behavior that was being observed cannot be generalized and not typical from all people.

One strength of this study was that qualitative data was collected, the 2 observers wrote down remarks that the passengers have said. The remarks show deeper insight on why the passengers did not help. Comments that were overheard was “you feel so bad when you don’t know what to do” and “I never saw this kind of thing before” suggests that the passengers were surprised by the event and did not know what decision to make.

Question 28

What is bystander behaviour?

Answer 28

The presence of other people will drastically reduce the likelihood of help being offered in emergency situations.

Question 29

What is pro social behaviour?

Answer 29

Behaviour that is beneficial to other people, but may not be beneficial to the helper.

Question 30

What is dispositional factor?

Answer 30

Explanations of behaviour in terms of an individual’s personality, character and their disposition.

Question 31

What are social factors?

Answer 31

Social factors are any external environmental stimuli that could influence someone’s behaviour.

Question 32

Outline the presence of others and how it affects bystander behaviour-

Answer 32

The presence of others will reduce the likelihood of help being offered in emergency situations. When there are a large number of people at a site of an emergency, help is less likely going to be given due to the large number of bystanders.

A research study has been conducted on naive participants, the reasearches have pumped (fake) smoke into a room when the participants were alone and when they were with 2 confederates. When the participants were alone they reported the smoke 75% of the time. When participants with 2 confederates they reported the smoke 10% of the time. This shows that people are less likely to act in the site of emergencies if other people were present.

Question 33

Outline the cost of helping and how it affects the bystander behaviour-

Answer 33

There are specific costs associated with helping someone in need.
The costs of helping- possible embarrassment because you can be mistaken as the victims friend, the effort that has to be made, the time, possible danger to yourself.
The costs of not helping- feeling guilty, the victim may die due to receiving no help, blaming others for not helping.
Piliavin concluded that a persons decision to help was a balance between these 2 costs.

Question 34

What are the social factors of pro social behaviour?

Answer 34

Cost of helping, presence of others

Question 35

What are the dispositional factors of pro social behaviour?

Answer 35

Similarity to victim, expertise

Question 36

Outline similarity to victim and how it affects bystander behaviour~ ;)

Answer 36

When a person is more similar to the victim they’re more likely to help since they put themselves in the victims shoes and would want someone to help them if they were in that situation.
Manchester United football fans were asked to walk around a college campus in which they had seen another M.U fan fall and hurt himself and they helped him. If they saw someone wearing a Liverpool shirt they hardly ever helped since they are despised rivals.

Question 37

Outline expertise and how it affects bystander behaviour-

Answer 37

An expert is someone with special knowledge and skills, some bystanders may have skills and knowledge that can decrease the cost of helping. Someone with medical training is able to help a victim that is choking or had gotten into an accident.
A study has shown that nurses were more likely to help someone that has fallen off a ladder rather than non-medical students because nurses have higher expertise.

Question 38

What is antisocial behaviour?

Answer 38

Behaviour that can potentially harm other people. This includes behaving aggressively.

Question 39

What is collective behaviour?

Answer 39

(Collects all the behaviour around people) The behaviour that emerges when people join together. The group may behave in a different way from the way individuals behave when they’re alone.

Question 40

What is deindividuation?

Answer 40

The psychological state in which an individual loses their own personal identity and takes on the group identity of the people around them. This could also be shown when an individual wears a specific “uniform” to fit in and represent the group of people that surround them.

Question 41

How does anonymity lead to anti social behaviour?

Answer 41

Anonymity makes us no longer have that fear of consequences for our actions, causing individuals to feel less responsibility for their behavior and actions. Individuals would stop behaving rationally and start behaving impulsively and antisocially due to being unidentifiable/hidden in a crowd.

Question 42

How do crowds give individuals anonymity?

Answer 42

It is much easier for individuals to act against their own character and beliefs due to being unidentifiable and hidden in a crowd.

Question 43

Why do people act in an antisocial manner as part of the crowd however they’re not anti social?

Answer 43

Due to anonymity (being unidentifiable and no longer having the fear of consequences of our actions) and freedom that is offered by the crowd which releases these negative behaviours.

Question 44

What are the Key factors which influence crowd-led deindividuation?

Answer 44

Darkness/ crowds being dark and not seen.
Wearing a disguise that doesn’t show your true character.
Wearing a uniform indicating and representing something you might not be.

Question 45

What are the social factors of crowd and collective behaviour?

Answer 45

Culture, social loafing.

Question 46

What are the dispositional factors of crowd and collective behaviour?

Answer 46

Morality and personality

Question 47

Outline social loafing and how it affects collective behaviour-

Answer 47

Social loafing is when people make a reduced individual effort when they’re a part of a group rather than when they’re by themselves.

Research study has been conducted and found out that when people pull on a rope they exert less effort as more people start to join their team.
However if people know that they’re being watched their effort increases.

Question 48

Outline culture and how it affects collective behaviour

Answer 48

Culture refers to someone’s set of beliefs and expectations.

People in individualist cultures(Us,Uk) favour independence, and they’re more focused on individual needs. And they do to what they think is the best outcome for them.

In collectivist cultures (china, Korea) decisions that individuals make are based on all their close ones/family members. (Decision are made in reference to their family and society in general)
One weakness with this explanation is that we are making generalizations about a country.

Question 49

Outline personality and how it affects collective behaviour-

Answer 49

People with an internal locus of control are less likely to be influenced by people’s behaviour in a crowd. They would be more likely to follow their own personal norms rather than social norms created by the people around them.

Question 50

What is the difference between an internal locus of control and external locus of control (Personality) -

Answer 50

Internal locus of control means the control that comes from within. An individual has personal control over their behaviour and life decisions. And believe that decisions they have done are caused by them.

External locus of control means when an individual believes that factors such as fate, luck, universe and other people are responsible for the outcomes of events in their life.

Question 51

Outline morality and how it affects collective behaviour-

Answer 51

Morality is individuals ideas of what they believe is right or wrong.
People with a high moral strength are less likely going to be affected by the social norms that has been created by the crowd.
Some people have greater moral strength than others with means they believe in certain principles of right and wrong. Which leads them to not change their behavior to fit in with the social norms of the crowd.