Social Influence Flashcards
What is conformity?
A change in a persons behaviour as a result of real or imagined pressure by a social group.
What are the types of conformity?
Internalisation
When the person genuinely accepts the group publicly and privately and agrees even without the group. This change is permanent as it becomes how they think and feels it is correct
Compliance
A superficial change as it is just going along with the group without believing it. No private acceptance and stops as soon as the group pressure is gone.(temporary)
Identification
Changing your view because you value something of the group and seek acceptance but don’t always agree with the view. Public not private.
Explanations of conformity.
Deutsch and Gerard’s Two process theory arguing that there are two main reasons to why people conform:
The need to be right(ISI)
The need to be liked(NSI)
Informational social influence
It is one of two explanations to conformity by Deutsch and Gerald that says people agree with the majority due to the belief they are correct as it is about who the person thinks has better information. It is the need to be right and may lead the person to internalisation.
Normative social influence
The need to be liked and is about what is normal behaviour. People do not what to be ridiculed or rejected and instead want social approval.
It occurs when you are concerned of being rejected by strangers or people like your friends whose approval you want. It more pronounced in stressful situations where greater social support is needed.
An emotional process.
1955 Asch’s Study procedure.
Procedure.
Pps shown two cards one with a standard line and the other had comparison lines, then asked which one matched. They said the answers out loud and the naive pps was always near the last.
There were 18 trials with 12 critical trials where the confederates gave wrong answers to assess the conformity of pps.
Asch’s study participants
There were 123 naive pps and they were:
Male
American
Undergraduates
And each tested individually with 6-8 confederates
Asch’s findings.
The naive pps gave the wrong answer 36.8% of the time.
75% conformed at least once
The Asch’s effect as the extent of conforming even when the situation is unambiguous.
The pps later said they conformed to avoid rejection (Normative)
Asch’s Variations.
Asch was interested in what leads to an increase or decrease in conformity. He investigated these by changing the original procedure such as the:
Group size
Unanimity
Task Difficulty
Asch’s variation: group size.
Asch wanted to know if the group size was more important than group agreement.
3 confederates conformity rose but more made little difference.
Meaning less than 3 is insufficient but no need more than 3.
Asch’s variation:unanimity
Asch added another confederate who was a dissenter who disagreed with the others.
Sometimes the dissenter gave right answers and other times gave a different wrong answer.
This meant conformity reduced by 1/4 as it enabled the naive pps to act independently as the unanimity of the group is broken.
The influence of majority to an extent depends on group unanimity.
Asch’s variation: task difficulty.
Asch made the line judgements task harder by making the comparison lengths similar in length.
The conformity increased as the task is more ambiguous so the naive pps assume the group majority is more likely correct.
Conformity to social roles.
Social roles are the parts people play as members of social groups such as the role of child,student,worker.
These all have expectations and conformity to social roles is the extent to which people behave for the role.
Zimbardo.
Due to prison brutality in America in late 1960s he wanted to know whether it was that prison guards were sadistic or if it was the situation that created the violent behaviour.
So he created the Stanford Prison Experiment in 1973.
Zimbardo’s participants.
They were Stanford uni students who volunteered seeing the advertisements.
The ones who were emotionally stable were selected after psychological testing.
And randomly assigned the roles of guards or prisoners increasing the internal validity due to the control over individual personality differences being ruled out as they got their role by chance.
To heighten realism prisoners were actually arrested from the homes by police without any prior knowledge.
