Social Influence Flashcards
Two assumptions of social influence
- Behaviour is influenced by the situation by other individuals and by group
- Behaviour is influenced by culture and by society
What is social facilitation?
Social facilitation is the tendency for people to perform better on task in the presence of other than when alone
What is conformity?
Yielding to group pressure
What happened in the sherif study?
Aim was to investigate whether people would be influenced by others in the situation where the answer is not clear
What happened in the Asch study?
Aim: To find out if people will conform to the group when there is a distinct right and wrong answer, with the rest of the group giving the wrong answer.
Method:
- Using groups of between 6 and 9 people
- Only one true (naïve) participant
- Rest were confederates, told by Asch to give the same incorrect answer
- Told them they were doing a visual perception test, gave them a test line and 3 match lines, one of which matched to the test line
- Participants asked which one matched
- Confederates all gave the same wrong answer, naïve participant asked last
Results:
- 75% conformed at least once
- Mean conformity rate was 32%
- In a control group with no confederates, almost no one gave a wrong answer
Conclusion:
• People will conform, even when this means going against the evidence of their own eyes, in order to not appear different. COMPLIANCE OCCURRED.
Asch study evaluation
Methodological weaknesses:
- Low ecological validity
- Sampling – he only tested white young American males, cannot generalise
- Dated research – tested in 1950s, when people in America were afraid of speaking out.
Ethical weaknesses:
- Deception
- No informed consent
- Protection from (mental) harm
Why do people conform? Two types of social influence:
Informational social influence - when we conform because we don’t know the answer or how to react
Normative social influence - occurs when people conform because of the very powerful need for social approval and acceptance
Two types of conformity:
Compliance - publicly going along with the group opinion but privately disagreeing and maintaining our own belief
Internalisation - going along with the group opinion both privately and publicly
Factors affecting conformity
- Size of the group
- Task difficulty
- Providing support for the subject
- Introducing privacy
Other factors affecting conformity:
Crutchfield suggested that: personality characteristics associated with high levels of conformity including:
- low self-esteem
- low intelligence
- high levels of anxiety
- need for a social approval
What is obedience?
A type of social influence where someone acts in response to be direct direct order from an authority
Situational factors affecting obedience to authority
- Location
- Approximately to the victim
- Approximately of authority figure
- Social support
- A peer administers the shock
What is agentic state?
Lacking a sense of personal responsibility and feeling under the control of an authority figure
What is autonomous state?
Taking control of the behaviour; feeling responsible for and aware of the consequences of the behaviour
Characteristics of authoritarian personality
- Hostility to people perceived to be a lower status
- respect of people perceived to be of higher status
- a preoccupation with power
- blind respect for authority
Personality explanation of obedience
People with this type of personality are likely to show prejudice to a range of others and obey authority to punish or harm these people more easily than others with non-authoritarian personalities
Parents of the authoritarian group tended to be overstrict and highly punitive they also have unrealistically high expectation of the children
Fear of parents - excessively respectful of authority figures
Hatred of parents - hate and anger displaced onto others
Factors affecting defines of authority
- Social support
- role models
- personal experiences including education
- questioning motives
- loss of freedom
What is social inhibition?
The tendency for people to perform less well in the presence of others than when alone
What is dominant response?
The response which is most likely to be given in a situation, that is the most usual appropriate or best practice
Arousal theory
- According to the zajonc, the presence of others and lead to an increase in office physiological arousal
- this is an evolved response
- this increase in arousal is a drive that brings out our domiant response
If you are good at a task and then performance improves and we see social facilitation
If you are poor at the task and then performance worsen and we see social inhibition
Evaluation of arousal theory
- The theory does not explain why competitive people sometimes perform poorly with an audience
- yerkes-dodson law explains that a certain amount of arousal or stress increases performance up to point then can decreases rapidly
- Zajonc’s theory does not acknowledge cognitive processes, for example what the audience means to the person
- Also to some people the thought of being evaluated is an important factor
Evaluation apprehension theory
- It is not the mere presence of others that causes arousal but the fear of being judged or evaluated by them
- People associated the presence of others with evaluation of their performance on a task
- The fear of evaluation increases our arousal and brings out the dominant response
Evaluation of evaluation apprehension theory
- It does not explain why animals socially facilitate - who presumably do not experience evaluation apprehension
- evaluation apprehension maybe one cause of arousal but it may not be the only factor
- for the support from cottrell who blindfolded the audience and found no social facilitation on well learned to tasks
Distraction conflict theory
Suggests that others have an arousing effect because they are the source of distraction whether they are evaluating us or not
The presence of others put people into the state of attentional conflict over whether to attend to a task or two others
- Distraction leads to a negative effect on task performance regardless of whether the task is simple or complex because one is less able to come to concentrate on the task
- The attentional conflict increase arousal which leads to the dominant response
Evaluation of distraction conflict theory
- Good application - it can be applied to a wide range of different distractions
- this theory can explain social facilitation seen in animal studies
Evaluation of all research on social facilitation
- Audiences in experiments tend to be passive and simply observe someone performing a task. Real audience are often noisy and judge behaviour
- research has largely ignored personality differences between individuals
- task given to people are often artificial and hence the lack ecological validity
Milgram study
Aim: To investigate how far people will go in obeying an authority figure
Method:
- Experiment required out on 20-50 year old white men who responded to an advert Milgram put in the newspaper.
- Told to come to Yale University where they met a tall male experimenter in a white lab coat.
- Told that they were doing an experiment looking at the effects of punishment on behaviour.
- Had to perform some task to decide who would be the learner and who would be the teacher
- This was rigged, “teacher” was the naïve participant and “learner” was a confederate of Milgram.
- Task was to give an electric shock to the “learner” when they made a mistake in identifying word pairs. Shocks were given using a piece of equipment with 30 switches, from 15V – 450V (marked XXX on the machine)
- Shocks were faked.
Results:
- The “learner” purposely made many mistakes
- When the participants became distressed at having to administer shocks, they were told by Milgram to continue.
- 65% gave shocks to 450V. (Deadly)
Conclusion:
• People will obey an authority figure; even if they believe what they are doing is wrong.
