Social Influence : Resistance To Social Influence Flashcards
Evaluations of resistance to social influence : point 1 support for social support
Milgram found that when there were 2 disobedient confederates present in the procedure, obedience in the participant dropped to 10%.
Conversely, when there were 2 obedient confederates, obedience rose to 92.5%.
This demonstrates the power of social support in obedient behaviour.
Asch found that in his conformity procedure, when one of the confederates dissented from the majority and gave the right answer, conformity dropped to 5.5%.
This percentage remained the same even when the confederate dissenter gave a different answer from the majority, but that answer was still incorrect.
Asch concluded from this that the important factor was that the participant had support for deviating from the group, not support for his answer.
This supporting the view that any deviation from the majority will act as social support for non-conformity.
Evaluations of resistance to social influence : point 2 support internal LOC
Elms and Milgram investigated the background of some of the disobedient participants from Milgram’s obedience experiments.
They found that disobedient participants had a high internal LOC + scored higher on a scale that measured their sense of social responsibility.
Oliner & Oliner interviewed 2 groups of non-Jewish people who had lived through the Holocaust in Nazi Germany.
They compared 406 people who had rescued Jews with 126 who had not done so.
They found that the rescuers’ were more likely to have scores demonstrating a high internal LOC than the non-rescuers, and also scored more highly on measures of social responsibility.
This suggests that having an internal LOC is likely to lead to independent behaviour.
Evaluations of resistance to social influence : point 3 lack of internal validity
The supporting research lacks internal validity as it is correlational.
it is not possible to say internal LOC causes resistance to social influence.
There may be another factor that is associated with LOC that causes independence.
For example, it may be that certain parental styles lead to high internal LOC and high levels of independent behaviour.
the research lacks reliability as not all studies support the view that LOC is associated with resistance to social influence.
Shown when Williams and Warchal studied 30 university students who were given a range of conformity tasks based on Asch’s procedure.
Each student was also assessed using Rotter’s locus of control scale.
They found that those who conformed did not score differently on the LOC scale but they were less assertive,
so assertiveness may have more to do with conformity than LOC, showing that the explanation is limited.
