Social Influence p2 Flashcards
Social Change?
When society adopts a new belief or way of behaving which then becomes widely accepted as the norm.
How might majority influence be used to reduce stigma on mental health?
1- Get minority to conform to new view on mental health.
2- Conformity will hopefully be internalised to promote real changes in views (informational conformity).
Dispositional and Situational Factors
D= how are own personality can affect whether or not we will obey or conform. S= how external influences affect our behaviour.
Morality (df)
What is deemed as right or wrong.
Self-esteem (df)
How we perceive ourselves.
- people with a low se more likely to conform, as they do not trust their own judgement (informational).
Kohlberg (post-conventional) (df) = moral development
stage 5- social contract or legalistic orientation (doing what is right even if it is against the law).
stage 6- universal ethics principle orientation (doing what is right as of your inner conscience which has absorbed the principle of justice and equality in life).
= high stages of moral development
Kohlberg (conventional) (df) = moral development
stage 3- interpersonal concordance orientation(doing what is right according to majority to be good/liked).
stage 4- law and order orientation (doing what is right as it’s your duty to help others).
= middle stage of moral development
Kohlberg (pre-conventional) (df) = moral development
stage 1- punishment and obedience orientation (doing what is right in fear of punishment).
stage 2- hedonistic orientation (doing what is right for personal gain/rewards).
= low stage of moral development so more likely to lead to anti-social behaviour
What stage is anti-social behaviour most common in? (df)
Stage 2 because morality is egocentric, meaning the focus of the individual is what’s right for them, not society.
Kohlberg’s Study (df)
Followed the same group of boys over 12yrs (American) to see if their moral thinking changed.
Criticisms of Kohlberg’s Study into Moral Reasoning (df)
Cannot be generalised to women/ girls and other cultures (gender/ culturally biased).
Locus of Control (df)
A spectrum on how much a person feels they have control over their own life, with reference to external and internal factors
External LOC (df)
- believe they have little control over their lives (believe in fate/chance)
- more likely to ‘give up’ (e.g during a protest abusive behavior breaks out, they are most likely to sit and watch as they believe their influence has little influence)
Internal LOC (df)
=believe they have control over their own lives (more likely to go along with something as they believe they can have an impact)
- more likely to study hard for a test as they believe the amount of revision they do will reflect their score
Criticisms of LOC (df)
May not be a good explanation for crowd behaviour as people can have different LOC depending on the situation they are in. Therefore may make behaviour harder to predict and may not offer a useful explanation for how people behave in crowd situations.
Criticisms of DF
1) Dispositional explanations are reductionist as they do not take into account how we are influenced by those around us
2) Dispositional explanations lack generalisability as the research is biased to western cultures
The Brain - faulty moral reasoning (df)
- damage to the prefrontal cortex leads to faulty moral reasoning.
- people who damaged it in a car accident as a baby find it hard to decipher the difference between right and wrong (not their fault -suggests a fault in our justice system).
The Brain - self-esteem (df)
- people with low se have a reduced amount of grey matter in their hippocampus.
- therefore, may be a biological element to conformity.
Hippocampus
emotion and ability to control stress levels