social influence A LEVEL PSYCHOLOGY
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social influence A LEVEL PSYCHOLOGY - Leaderboard
social influence A LEVEL PSYCHOLOGY - Details
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| Conformity | Conformity is a type of social influence that can be described as changing your behaviour to go along with the group even if you do not agree with the group. |
| Compliance | Person changes their attitude or behaviour in response to group |
| Internalisation | True conformity where they change public and private, usually long term change result of Informational Social influence. |
| Normative social influence | When a person conforms to feel accepted, approved and liked. Not to be rejected or ridiculed. So, to gain acceptance, conformity to behaviour to which the public agrees with occurs. Associated with compliance and identification, only short term conformation. |
| Informational Social Influence (ISI) | Conforms to gain knowledge or when they believe someone else is right. Associated with internalisation so its long term conformation. Most likely to occur when a situation is ambiguous, crisis or we believe others to be experts. |
| Aim of Asch's experiment | To see if the real participants would conform to social influence in a situation where the correct answer is unambiguous |
| Procedure of Asch Experiment | 123 male american undergrad students were asked to compete in a vision test. they had to pick which of the three lines shown were the same. however, in the experiment, all but one of the ppts were confederates. The real ppt was always called second to last and the confederates gave unanimous wrong answers. |
| Findings | 75% of ppts conformed to the majority at least once by choosing the obvious wrong answer. |
| Factors that influence conformity | Group size - 1 confederate 3% conformity, 3 confederates 32% (highest) 15 confederates 29% Unanimity - if one confederate always gave a different answer from majority or always gave the correct answer. conformity dropped by a lot. task difficulty - the harder the task, the lower the conformity. |
| DISADVANTAGES of Asch's experiment | - beta bias, research was done on men and generalized to women. ignores the differences between men and women - child of its time, national conformity rates at that time were very high. experiment repeated in UK with MUCH lower conformity rates. - low ecological validity, not a realistic situation, cannot be generalised to other real situations. |
| ADVANTAGES of Asch's experiment | - lab experiment so highly controlled, experiment could be replicated easily. influence of extraneous variables were minimised |
| Aim of Zimbardo's Stanford Prison experiment | Whether people would conform to social roles when placed in a mock prison environment. he wanted to see if the situation lead to the behaviour. |
| Procedure of Zimbardo's experiment | - 24 Male University Students volunteered after seeing a newspaper advertisement - participants were picked after testing their mental and physical stability - each student was paid 15 dollars and randomly assigned role of prisoner or guard. - the prisioners were arrested at their homes by real police, they were given a smock to wear and chained. - guards were given reflective glasses and uniform and told not to use physical violence - experiment was set to run for 2 weeks |
| Findings of Zimbardo's experiment | - Prisoners and guards were quick to identify to their social roles - Prisoners rebelled a few days in and the guards threatened them in return - in a rather a sadistic way. - Experiment was shut down after six days due to breaking of ethical guidelines |
| Conclusion of Stanford Prison Experiment | Zimbardo concluded that people are quick to conform to their social roles, even if it goes against their moral principles. Situational factors were largely responsible. |
| DISADVANTAGES of stanford prison experiment | - individualistic differences also contributed to the extent to which people conform. some of the guards were actually sympathetic to the prisoners and offered support. situational factors are not the only factor contributing to conformity - broke several ethical guidelines, deception and protection from harm. |
| DISADVANTAGES of miligram's study | - lacks ecological validity , experiment took place in a lab so it cant be generalised to real life scenarios. - breaking of ethical guidelines, no informed consent, psycholgical harm and deception |
| Obedience | Obedience is the change of an individual’s behaviour to comply with a demand by an authority figure. |
| Aim of Miligram 1963 experiment | To investigate whether ordinary people would obey an unjust order from an authority figure and cause physical harm to an innocent person. |
| Procedure of Miligram's experiment | - 40 male american ppts volunteered, they believed it was an experiment to test the relationship between learning and punishment - ppts were paid 4.50 dollar for taking part in the study - Two ppts (one confederate) were asked to draw lots to decide who was the learner and who was the teacher. - the teacher was asked to administer electrical shocks at increasing power whenever the learner got an answer wrong. - learner was not in the room with them - volts went from 15 to 450 volts, at 315 volts the learner stopped responding, suggesting they had passed out or even died. When the teacher hesitated to administer the |
| Findings of Miligram's experiment | - all ppts went up to at least 300 volts - 65% of ppts went to the full 450 volts |
| ADVANTAGES of miligram's study | - highly controlled, high internal validity - would be able to establish cause and effect |
| DISADVANTAGES of miligram's study | - lacks ecological validity , experiment took place in a lab so it cant be generalised to real life scenarios. - breaking of ethical guidelines, no informed consent, psycholgical harm and deception |
| What is agency theory | Theory that we are taught from childhood to obey rules set by society. When a person is acting under an authority figure and carrying out their orders as their ‘agent’. This prevents them from taking responsibility for their actions |
| Autonomous state | When an individual acts independently. |
| What binds individuals to agentic stage | Binding factors, like fear of punishment |
| Agentic shift | Shift from autonomous to agentic state |
| Legitimate authority figure | He believed that individuals were more likely to obey someone with high status/high position in the social hierarchy. People will obey these authority figures in fear of punishment, the figure can be someone who can enforce law like the police. |
| Destructive obedience | When issues occur because of an authority figure using their power for destructive purposes. |
| Variations of Miligrams Study | - someone else administered the shock (agentic state), obedience rate was 92% - experiment took place in a run down building, obedience rate when down to 47% - teacher and learner were the same room, the proximity to the learner caused rate to go down to 40% - the lack of proximity with authority figure caused rate to drop to 20% - when the authority figure was replaced with a peer in normal clothes, also caused rate to go to 20% |
| Obedience can depend on cultures | - Kilham and Mann found that Australia's obedience rate was much lower. 40% in men and 16% of females - Germany was found to have 85% obedience rate |
| Uniform is a situational variable for obedience | - People wearing guard uniform saw high obedience rates (89%) - While those dressed as civilians only saw 33% obedience rate |
| Authoritarian Personality | Person who has extreme respect for authority and is more likely to be obedient to those who hold power over them |
| Common characteristics of authoritarian personality | - respects authority figures - strong belief in justice - likely to follow right wing politics - aggressive to those inferior to others |
| Adorno et Al | Conducted a study with 2000 middle class American Caucasians to find their unconscious beliefs on other racial groups. Using the F scale, which measured fascist tendencies. Adorno found a strong correlation between prejudice and authoritarianism. He also found people who were high on the F scale identified as authoritarian and were status conscious. |
| EVAL of f scale | - response bias - f scale only measures extreme right wing methodologies, authoritarian personality can also be displayed by left wing extremes. So the F scale is not politically diverse |
| Minority influence | Type of social influence where individuals reject established majority group norms. It is achieved through a process of conversion, where the majority are gradually ‘won over’ to a minority viewpoint. |
| 3 main process of minority influence | Consistency (unchanging in both behaviour and attitudes) Commitment - argumentation principle (resist social pressure) Flexible (cooperative and reasonable) |
| Social change | The way in which society develops via shifts in people’s beliefs, attitudes and behaviour. Social change happens all the time. But it happens gradually with minority influence as the driving force |
| Social Support | Presence of people who resist pressure to conform or obey can help others to do the same. These people can act as models to show others resistance is possible |
| Dissenter | Example of social support, someone who goes against majority - in asch's variational studies, presence of dissenter caused obedience to drop by a lot - In Miligrams variation study there were two other confederates with the ppt, when the confederates dissentered obedience dropped from 65 to 10 |
| Locus of control | Refers to individual differences in people's beliefs and expectations about what controls events in their lives. |
| LOC and its effect on obedience | - those with internal LoC are less likely to conform than those with external LoC |