Social Influence

Question 1

What are the three types of Conformity?

Answer 1

Internalisation, Identification and Compliance

Question 2

What is Internalisaton?

Answer 2

When a person genuinely accepts the group norms. This results in a private and public change of opinions/behaviours. This is usually permanent because the attitude has been internalised.

Question 3

What is Identification?

Answer 3

Sometimes we conform to the opinions/behaviour of a group because we value something about them and so we want to be accepted by the group, even if we don’t privately agree with all their views.

Question 4

What is Compliance?

Answer 4

Simply going along with others in public but privately not changing personal opinions/behaviours. This only results in superficial changes. It also means that particular behaviour or opinion stops as soon as group pressure stops.

Question 5

Who developed a two-way process theory?

Answer 5

Deutsh and Gerald

Question 6

What are the two main reasons why people conform?

Answer 6

Normative Social Influence and Informative Social Influence

Question 7

What is Normative Social Influence?

Answer 7

Normative social influence is about ‘norms’ . It is an emotional not cognitive process. Norms regulate the behaviour of groups or individuals to avoid being rejected.

Question 8

What is Informative Social Influence?

Answer 8

Informative social influence is about who has the better information. E.g. In class when you are stuck so you follow the majority of the class.

Question 9

What is one evaluation for the Explanations of conformity?

Answer 9

One strength of NSI is that there is evidence to support it as an explanation of conformity. For example, when Asch interviewed his participants, some said they conformed because they felt self-conscious giving the correct answer and they were afraid of disapproval. When participants wrote down their answers, conformity fell down to 12.5%. This is because giving answers privately meant there was no normative group pressure. This shows that at least some conformity is due to a desire not to be rejected by the group for disagreeing with them.

Question 10

What is one evaluation for the Explanations of conformity?

Answer 10

Another strength is that there is research evidence to support the ISI from the study by Todd Lucas et al (2006). Lucas et al found that participants conformed more often to incorrect answers they were given when the math problem was difficult. This is because when the problems are easy, they ‘know their minds’ but when it gets harder, the situation becomes ambiguous. They did not want to be wrong, so they relied on the answers they were given. This shows that ISI is a valid explanation of conformity because the results are what ISI would predict.

Question 11

What is one evaluation for the Explanations of conformity?

Answer 11

One limitation is that individual differences may play a role in explaining social influence which means that the processes will not affect everyone’s behaviours in the same way. For example, Perrin and Spencer (1980) conducted an Asch-style experiment, but this time using engineering students in the UK. Only one conforming response was observed out of nearly 400 trials. This could be due to the fact that the students felt more confident in their ability to judge line lengths due to their experience in engineering and so felt less pressure to conform. Alternatively, it could be argued that this difference due to a historical bias from comparing research conducted in a different era and almost 30 years apart where rapid social changes have emerged, and norms have changed.

Question 12

What is one evaluation for the Explanations of conformity?

Answer 12

One strength of the NSI explanation is that there are real world applications that demonstrate NSI also occurs beyond the artificial laboratory setting. For example, Schultz et al. (2008) gathered data from many hotels over a week where guests were allocated to rooms randomly as either control or experimental conditions. In the control rooms, there was a door hanger informing the participants of the environmental benefits of reusing towels. In the experimental condition, there was additional information stating that ‘75% of guests chose to reuse their towels each days’. The results showed that in comparison to the control conditions, guests who received a message that contained normative information about other guests reduced their need for fresh towels by 25%, showing they had conformed in order to ‘fit in’ with the perceived group behaviour.

Question 13

What was the Aim of Asch’s study?

Answer 13

:To examine the extent to which social pressure to conform from unanimous majority affects conformity in an unambiguous situation.

Question 14

What was the Procedure of Asch’s study?

Answer 14

Asch sample consisted of 123 male undergraduate students from Swarthmore College in the USA who believed they were taking part in a vision test. He used a line judge task, where he placed one real (naïve) participant in a room of 6 to 8 confederates (actors) who agreed their answers in advance. The naive participant was deceived and was led to believe the confederates were also real participants. The second participant was always seated second to last. Each person in turn had to say out loud which line (A, B, C) was most like the target line in length. The correct answer was clearly incorrect.

Question 15

What were the findings of Asch’s study?

Answer 15

Asch measured the number of times each participant conformed to the majority view. On average, the real participants conformed to the incorrect answers 32% of the critical trials. 74% of the participants conformed on at least one critical trial and 26% of the participants never conformed. Asch also used a control group, in which one real participant completed the same experiment without any confederates. He found that less than 1% of the participants gave an incorrect answer.

Question 16

What are the variables that affect conformity?

Answer 16

• Group size
• Unanimity of the majority
• Difficulty of the task

Question 17

What is group size in context of Asch’s study?

Answer 17

Asch wanted to know whether the size of the group would be more important that the agreement of the group. To test this he varied the number of confederates from one to 15, so total group size will be from one to 16. Conformity increased with group size, but only up to a point. With three confederates, conformity to the wrong answer rose to 31.8%. But the presence of more confederates made little difference. This suggests that most people are very sensitive to the views of others because just one or two confederates was enough to sway opinion.

Question 18

What is Unanimity in context of Asch’s study?

Answer 18

Asch wondered if the presence of non-conforming person would affect the naïve participants conformity. He introduced a confederate who disagreed with the other confederates. In one variation of the study, this person gave the correct answer, and in another variation, he gave a different (wrong) answer. The genuine participant conformed less often in the presence of a dissenter. The rate decreased to less than a quarter of the level it was when the majority was unanimous. The presence of a dissenter appeared to free the naïve participant to behave more independently. This was even when the dissenter disagreed with the genuine participant. This suggested that the influence of the majority depends to a large extent on it being unanimous. And that non-conformity is more likely when cracks are perceived in the majority’s unanimous view.

Question 19

What is Task Difficulty in context of Asch’s study?

Answer 19

Asch wanted to know whether making the task harder would affect the degree of conformity. He increased the difficulty of the line-judging task by making the stimulus line and comparison lines more similar to each other in length. This meant it became harder for genuine participants to see the differences between the lines.
Asch found that conformity increased. It may be that the situation is more ambiguous when the task becomes harder – it is unclear to the participants what the right answer is. In these circumstances, It is natural to look to other people for guidance and to assume that they are right and you are wrong.

Question 20

What is one evaluation for the variables affecting conformity?

Answer 20

One limitation of Asch’s research is that the task and situation were artificial. Participants knew they were in a research study and may simply gone along with what was expected (DEMAND CHARACTERISITICS). The task of identifying lines was relatively trivial and therefore there was really no reason not to conform. Also, according to Susan Fiske 2014, ‘Asch’s groups were not very groupy’, i.e. they did not really resemble groups that we experience in everyday life. This means the findings do not generalise to real-world situations, especially those where the consequences of conformity might by important.

Question 21

What is one evaluation for the variables affecting conformity?

Answer 21

Another limitation is that Asch’s participants were American men, this means that the Study lacks generalisability. Other research suggests that women may be more conformist, possibly because they are concerned about social relationships and being accepted. Furthermore, the USA is an individualist culture (i.e. where people are more concerned about themselves rather than their social group). Similar conformity studies conducted in collectivist cultures (such as China where the social group is more important than the individual) have found that conformity rates are higher (Bond and Smith 1996). This means that Asch’s findings tell us little about conformity in women and people from some cultures.

Question 22

What is one evaluation for the variables affecting conformity?

Answer 22

One strength of Asch’s research is support from other studies for the effects of task difficult. For example, Todd Lucas et al asked their participants to solve ‘easy and ‘hard’ maths problems. Participants were given answers from three other students (not actually real). The participants conformed more often (i.e. agreed with the wrong answers) when the problems were harder. This shows Asch was correct in claiming that task difficulty is one variable that affects conformity.

Question 23

What is one evaluation for the variables affecting conformity?

Answer 23

One limitation of Asch’s research is that it is ethically questionable. He broke several ethical guidelines, including deception and protection from harm. Asch deliberately deceived his participants, saying that they were taking part in a vision test and not experiment of conformity. Although it is seen as unethical to deceive participants. Asch’s experiment required deception in order to achieve valid results. If the participants were aware of the true aim, they may have displayed demand characteristics and acted differently. In addition, Asch’s participants were not protected from psychological harm and many of the participants reported feeling stressed when they disagreed with the majority. However, Asch interviewed all of his participants following the experiment to overcome the issue.