Social Influence Flashcards
What is conformity?
A form of social influence where a person’s behaviour changes due to real or imagined group pressure.
Social vs dispositional factors?
Social factors - features of the surroundings that make you conform
Dispositional factors - features of yourself that make you conform
What are the social factors for conformity?
Group size - more people = greater pressure to conform to their opinion.
Anonymity - more anonymity means lower conformity because people cannot be identified.
Task Difficulty - higher task difficulty results in higher conformity because people become less confident in their own answers.
What are the dispositional factors for conformity?
Personality - A person with an external locus of control believes that they do not influence what happens to them, and people with an external LOC are more likely to conform to group pressure
Expertise - Intelligence increases confidence in opinions and so people with greater expertise are less likely to conform to group pressure.
Asch’s Study of Conformity - AMRC (KEY STUDY)
A - to investigate how people respond to group pressure and its link to conformity
M - 123 male American students, with each naïve ppt tested in a group of 6-8 confederates. Ppts were shown a line (standard line) and three comparison lines and asked to match the standard line with line A, B or C. Confederates purposely gave unambiguous wrong answer, and occasionally right answers, to test the ppts (12 critical trials)
R - Ppts gave a wrong answer 36.8% of the time, and 75% of ppts conformed at least once
C - People are influenced by group pressure, even in simple tasks with clear wrong answers, but people can still resist conformity.
Asch’s Study of Conformity - Evaluations (KEY STUDY)
Weakness - Generalisability
The study was androcentric (only males) so findings cannot be generalised to females as the research doesn’t show how females would have responded
Weakness - Generalisability
Study was ethnocentric as it used only Americans, so findings cannot be generalised because we don’t know how non-Americans would react.
What is obedience?
A form of social influence in which a person is following orders from an authority figure such as a policeman.
Milgram’s Study of Obedience - AMRC (KEY STUDY)
A - to see if a normal person would follow potentially lethal orders from an authority figure
M - 40 male ppts aged 20-50 told they were doing memory research. The ppt was assigned “teacher” while a confederate was a “learner”, as well as the “experimenter” who acted as an authority figure. The experimenter told the teacher to give shocks to the learner each time they got an answer wrong in the memory game. Voltage reached from 15V up to a lethal 450V.
R - All ppts went to 300V, with 65% going to the full 450V. 3 ppts had seizures from stress.
C - people obey an authority figure if they believe they are not responsible for their actions, and they obeyed due to a new location and the pressure.
What is Milgram’s agency theory?
A social factor of obedience that we obey because we act as an agent for an authority figure, as we are no longer responsible for our actions. He stated we shift into an “agentic state”.
Milgram’s Study of Obedience - Evaluations (KEY STUDY)
Weakness - Ethics
Many ppts showed signs of stress such as shaking & tension, with some experiencing seizures. This causes ethical issues as it could be argued that the research was not worth the stress it caused on ppts, and can harm future research.
Weakness - Generalisability (unrepresentative sample)
Study was androcentric (only males) so we cannot generalise the findings to anybody who isn’t an American male as we do not know how they would have reacted.
Agentic state vs Autonomous state?
Agentic state - we act on behalf of an authority figure, so we are more likely to obey due to feeling less responsibility for actions
Autonomous state - we act according to our own beliefs, so we are less likely to obey due to feeling more responsibility for our actions.
What is a social factor of obedience?
Proximity - increased proximity leads to lower levels of obedience due to an increased “moral strain” leading to a higher sense of personal responsibility.
Milgram’s Agency Theory - Evaluations
Strength - supporting research
Hofling found that 21/22 nurses administered double the max dose of a drug because they were told to on the phone by a doctor. Strength because it shows people obey to authority figures as stated by the theory.
Strength - Usefulness
The theory explains why atrocities such as the Holocaust occurred.
Strength because the theory has real life application and helps explain society.
What is Adorno’s Authoritarian Personality?
A person susceptible to obeying people in an authority position. They obey those above them but are hostile to those below them, often due to harsh parenting. They often think in “black and white” as they believe in rigid stereotypes (cognitive style), and they can’t see that people can be different. Usually as a result from experiencing harsh parenting and conditional love, as the child internalises these values and expects everyone to act like this.
What is scapegoating?
Displacing one’s anger onto another, typically someone viewed as lower in status, in order to relieve hostility.
