Social Influence Flashcards
Types of conformity
Internalisation, Identification and Compliance
Explanations for conformity
Informational social influence- desire to be correct.
Normative social influence- yielding to group pressure to fit in and be accepted.
What is internalisation?
Deepest level of conformity- change both privately and publicly.
What is identification?
Middle level of conformity. Person changes their public behaviour and private behaviour but only whilst they are with the group.
What is compliance?
It is the lowest level of conformity. A person will do what someone asks them to do like an action. Links into the agentic state.
The variables affecting conformity (Asch’s study)
Group size- When there was one confederate, the real participants conformed on just 3% of the critical trials. When the group size increased to two confederates, the real participants conformed on 12.8% of the critical trials. When there were three confederates, the real participants conformed on 32% of the critical trials- reached it’s highest ever with just 3 confederates.
Unanimity- In one variation of Asch’s experiment, one of the confederates was instructed to give the correct answer throughout. In this variation the rate of conformity dropped to 5%.
In another variation, one of the confederates gave a different incorrect answer to the majority. In this variation conformity still dropped significantly, by this time to 9%. This shows that if you break the group’s unanimous position, then conformity is reduced, even if the answer provided by the supporter, is still incorrect.
Task difficulty- He made the task more difficult, by making the difference between the line lengths significantly smaller. In this variation Asch found the rate of conformity increased. This is likely to be the result of informational social influence, as individuals look to another for guidance when completing the task.
Conformity to social roles (Zimbardo’s Study)
His aim was to examine whether people would conform to the social roles of a prison guard or prisoner, when placed in a mock prison environment. Furthermore, he also wanted to examine whether the behaviour displayed in prisons was due to internal dispositional factors, the people themselves, or external situational factors, the environment and conditions of the prison.
Zimbardo’s procedure
21 male university students who volunteered in response to a newspaper advert. The participants were selected on the basis of their physical and mental stability and were each paid to take part. The participants were randomly assigned to one of two social roles, prisoners or guards.
He turned the basement of Stanford University into a mock prison. Furthermore, the ‘prisoners’ were arrested by real local police and fingerprinted, stripped and given a numbered smocked to wear, with chains placed around their ankles.
The guards were instructed to run the prison without using physical violence. The experiment was set to run for two weeks.
Zimbardo’s findings
The guards dehumanised the prisoners, waking them during the night and forcing them to clean toilets with their bare hands; the prisoners became increasingly submissive, identifying further with their subordinate role.
5 of the prisoners were released from the experiment early, because of their adverse reactions to the physical and mental torment, for example, crying and extreme anxiety.
Terminated after just six days, when fellow postgraduate student Christina Maslach convinced Zimbardo that conditions in his experiment were inhumane.
Zimbardo’s conclusions
Zimbardo concluded that people quickly conform to social roles, even when the role goes against their moral principles.
Furthermore, he concluded that situational factors were largely responsible for the behaviour found, as none of the participants had ever demonstrated these behaviours previously.
What are the explanations for obedience?
Agentic state and legitimacy of authority
Situational variables affecting obedience including proximity and location and uniform (Milgram)
What is agentic state?
The agentic state is an explanation of obedience offered by Milgram and is where an individual carries out the orders of an authority figure, acting as their agent.
The shift from autonomy to ‘agency’ is referred to as the ‘agentic shift’.
What is legitimacy of authority?
Milgram suggested that we are more likely to obey a person who has a higher position or status in a social hierarchy.
Milgram’s variation studies investigating the 3 situational variables affecting conformity.
Proximity- The teacher had to force the learner’s hand down onto a shock plate when they refuse to participate after 150 volts. Obedience fell to 30%.
The participant is no longer buffered / protected from seeing the consequences of their actions.
Location- The experiment was moved to a set of run down offices rather than the impressive Yale University. Obedience dropped to 47.5%. This suggests that status of location effects obedience.
Uniform- Milgram carried out a variation in which the experimenter was called away because of a phone call right at the start of the procedure.
The role of the experimenter was then taken over by an ‘ordinary member of the public’ (a confederate) in everyday clothes. The obedience level dropped to 20%.
Dispositional explanation for obedience
The authoritarian personality-
Adorno et al. (1950) proposed that prejudice is the results of an individual’s personality type. They piloted and developed a questionnaire, which they called the F-scale.
