Social Influence

AQA Psychology A-level

Conformity

A change in a person's behaviour or opinions as a result of real or imagined pressure from a person or group of people.

Internalisation

Genuinely accepting the group norms, private, public and permanent change of opinions and behaviour.

Identification

Conforming to the opinions and behaviour of a group because we value the group, publicly change opinions and behaviour but may not privately agree with all the values of the group.

Compliance

Going along with the group in public, but privately not changing behaviour and opinions (superficial change). Behaviour/opinion stops as soon as public pressure stops.

Informational Social Influence (ISI)

* Who has the better information
* Uncertain about what is right or wrong
* Desire to be right
* A cognitive process
* Occurs in ambiguous situations
* Occurs in crisis situations where quick decisions have to be made
* Occurs when one person is regarded as being more of an expert

Normative Social Influence (NSI)

* What is normal or typical behaviour for a social group
* People want to gain social approval and not be rejected
* Emotional process
* Occurs in situations with strangers when concerned about rejection
* Occurs with friends when you want social approval
* More pronounced in stressful situations where you have greater need of social support

A03: Research support for ISI S

* There was greater conformity to incorrect answers when mathematical questions were more difficult
* This was most true for students who had a poor mathematical ability
* This shows that people conform in situations where they feel they don't know the answer

A03: Individual Differences in NSI W

* NSI doesn't affect everyone in the same way
* Some people are less concerned with being liked
* nAffiliators have a greater need for affiliation - a need for being in a relationship with others
* People in high need of affiliation are more likely to conform that those who are not
* Therefore, there are individual differences in the way people respond

A03: ISI & NSI work together W

* For example, conformity is reduced when there is one other dissenting participant in the Asch experiment
* This dissenter may reduce the power of NSI (dissenter provides social support) OR reduce the power of ISI (alternative source of information)
* It isn't always possible to be sure whether NSI or ISI is working
* This is the case in lab studies, but even truer in real life outside the lab
* This casts doubt over the view of ISI and NSI as two processes operating independently in conformity

Asch: Research procedure

* Showed ps two large white cards at a time, one card had a 'standard line', and the other one has three 'comparison lines'
* One of the three lines was the same length as the standard and the other two were substantially different
* Asked ps which line matched standard
* Used 123 male American undergraduates
* There was a group of between 6 and 8 confederates, naive ps not aware they were confederates
* All confederates gave same wrong answer
* On 12 'critical trials' out of 18, confederates all gave wrong answer

Asch: Findings

* Naive participant gave wrong answer 36.8% of time
* 25% of ps did not conform on any trials, so 75% did at least once
* This is known as the Asch effect- the extent to which ps conform even when the situation is unambiguous
* When ps were later interviewed they said they conformed to avoid rejection (normative social influence)

Asch: Group Size

* When there were 3 confederates conformity to wrong answers rose to 31.8%
* Addition of further confederates made no difference
* This suggests a small minority is not sufficient for influence to be exerted, but at the other extreme, there is no need for a majority of more than three.

Asch: Unanimity

* Presence of another, non-conforming participant.
* Presence of dissenting confederate meant conformity was reduced by a quarter from the level it was when the majority was unanimous.
* Dissenter enabled naive participant to behave more independently.

Asch: Task Difficulty

* When the line judging task was made more difficult (lines more similar in length) , conformity increased.
* This suggests that ISI plays a greater role when the task becomes harder, as the situation is more ambiguous.

Asch A03: A child of its time

* Asch's study was replicated with engineering students in the UK.
* Only one student conformed in a total of 396 trials.
* Maybe engineering students were more confident about measuring lines than the original sample, so were less conformist.
* It is also possible that the 1950s were a very conformist time in America.
* Society has changed a great deal since then.
* This means that the Asch effect is not consistent across situations or time, so is not a fundamental feature of human behaviour.

Asch A03: Artificial situation and task

* Ps knew they were in a research study so may have responded to demand characteristics.
* The task was relatively trivial so there was no reason not to conform.
* Didn't resemble groups that we are part of in everyday life.
* This means that the findings do not generalise to everyday situations.

Asch A03: Limited application of findings

* Asch only tested men; other research suggests women may be more conformist because they're concerned about social relationships and being accepted than men.
* Asch studied an individualist culture (American); when similar studies were conducted in collectivist cultures (eg, China), conformity rates were higher.
* This shows that Asch's findings may only apply to American men as he didn't take gender and cultural differences into account.

Zimbardo: Research procedure

* Set up a mock prison in the basement of Stanford University.
* Advertised for students willing to volunteer and selected those who were 'emotionally stable' after extensive psychological testing.
* Students randomly assigned roles of guards or prisoners; to heighten realism prisoners were arrested in their homes by police and delivered to prison.
* They were blindfolded, strip-searched, deloused and issued a uniform and a number.
* The prisoners had heavily regulated daily routines, had to follow 16 rules enforced by guards, who worked in shifts and their names were never used.
* The guards had their own uniform, wooden club, handcuffs, keys and mirror shades.
* Guards had complete power over prisoners, eg could decide when they go to the toilet.

Zimbardo: Findings

* Guards behaviour became a threat to prisoner's psychological and physical health so study was stopped after 6 days instead of the intended 14.
* Prisoners ripped uniforms, shouted, swore at guards, who retaliated with fire extinguishers.
* Guards employed 'divide and rule' tactics by playing the prisoners off against each other, constantly harassed prisoners.
* eg, conducted frequent headcounts, sometimes in the middle of the night.
* After their rebellion was put down, prisoners became subdued, depressed and anxious.
* 1 prisoner was released on the 1st day because they showed symptoms of psychological disturbance.
* 2 more were released on the 4th day.
* 1 prisoner went on hunger strike, so guards attempted to force feed him and punished him by putting him in 'the hole', but he was shunned by the other prisoners.
* Guard's behaviour became more brutal and aggressive, and enjoyed the power they had over prisoners.

Zimbardo: Conclusion

* Revealed power of the situation to influence people's behaviour.
* Guards, prisoners and researchers all conformed to roles within prison.
* Even volunteers who came in to perform certain functions found themselves behaving as if they were in a prison rather than a psychological study.

Zimbardo A03: Control

* Zimbardo and colleagues had some control over variables, eg, selection of participants.
* Chose emotionally stable ps and randomly assigned them to social roles.


* This was one way they tried to rule out individual personality differences in the findings.
* If ps behaved differently but only had these roles by chance then behaviour may have been due to pressures of the situation.
* This increases internal validity of study.

Zimbardo A03: Lack of realism

* Ps were only play-acting and not genuinely conforming to roles, performance based on stereotypes of how prisoners and guards are supposed to behave.
* eg, one guard said he based his role on a brutal character from a film, which explains why prisoners rioted - they thought that's what real prisoners did.
* However, the situation was v.real to ps - qualitative data gathered showed that 90% of prisoners conversations were about prison life.
* This gives a high degree of internal validity

Zimbardo A03: Role of dispositional influences

* Zimbardo exaggerated the power of the situation to influence behaviour, minimised role of personality factors (dispositional factors)
* eg, only 1/3 guards behaved in a brutal manner, another 1/3 were keen on applying the rules fairly, and the other 1/3 tried to help and support prisoners, sympathising, offering cigarettes and reinstating privileges.
* This suggests that Zimbardo's conclusion may be over-stated.
* Differences in guard's behaviour indicate they were able to exercise right and wrong choices, despite situational pressures to conform to a role.

Milgram: Research procedure

* Used 40 male ps through advertisement in newspapers, ad said he was looking for ps for a study about memory.
* Ps between 20 and 50 years and jobs ranged from unskilled to professional.
* Offered $4.50 to take part (reasonable in early 60s).
* A confederate was always the 'learner', while the true participant was the 'teacher'; there was also an 'experimenter' (another confederate), dressed in a lab coat played by an actor.
* Learner was strapped into a chair in a diff room wired with electrodes, teacher was required to give the learner an electric shock every time the learner made a mistake (task involved learning word pairs), but the shocks were not real.
* Shock level started at 15 (slight shock) and rose through 30 levels up until 450 volts (danger-severe shock)
* When the teacher got to 300 volts the learner pounded on the wall and gave no response to next question.
* After 315 volts learner pounded on wall and gave no response.
* When teacher turned to experimenter for guidance they gave a standard instruction 'an absence of response should be treated as a wrong answer'.
* If teacher was unsure about continuing, experimenter used 4 'prods'.
* 1. Please continue


2. The experiment requires that you continue
3. It is absolutely essential that you continue
4. You have no other choice, you must go on

Milgram: Findings

* No ps stopped below 300 volts
* 12.5% stopped at 300 volts
* 65% continued to highest level of 450 volts
* Qualitative data showed extreme tension: sweating, trembling, stuttering, biting lips, groaning, digging fingernails into hands.
* 3 had 'full blown uncontrollable seizures.
* Prior to study Milgram asked 14 students to predict ps behaviour.
* They estimated that no more than 3% would continue to 450 volts, but this was not the case.
* Ps were debriefed, assured behaviour was normal.
* Follow up questionnaire showed 84% were glad to have taken part.

Milgram A03: Low internal validity

* It has been argued that ps guessed the electric shocks weren't real so behaved differently.
* This had been confirmed by recent research; tapes of Milgram's studies were reviewed and it was reported that many of them expressed doubts about the shocks.
* However, a similar study was conducted where real shocks were given to a puppy; despite the real shocks, 54% of the male ps and 100% of females delivered what they thought were fatal shocks.
* This suggests that the effects in Milgram's study were genuine because people behaved the same way with real shocks.
* Milgram himself reported that 70% of his ps said they believed the shocks were genuine.

Milgram A03: Good external validity

* The central feature of this experiment was the relationship between the authority figure (experimenter) and ps.
* Milgram argued that the lab environment accurately reflected wider authority relationships in real life.
* This is supported by other research; nurses on a hospital ward were studied, and it was found that levels of obedience to unjustified demands by doctors were very high (21 out of 22 nurses obeyed).
* This suggests that processes of obedience to authority that occurred in Milgram's study can be generalised to other situations in real life.

Milgram A03: Ethical issues

* Milgram lead ps to believe that the allocation of teacher and learner roles was random, but it was in fact fixed.
* The most significant deception was that the electric shocks weren't real when ps believed they were.
* This has been objected to as deception is seen as a betrayal of trust that could damage the reputation of psychologists and their research

Situational Variables: Proximity

* In Milgram's original study, teacher and learner were in adjoining rooms, so teacher could hear learner but not see them.
* In proximity variation, they were in the same room, so obedience rate dropped from 65% to 40%.
* In a more dramatic variation, teachers forced learner's hand onto an 'electroshock plate' when they refused to answer a question (touch proximity), and obedience rate dropped to 30%.
* In a 3rd proximity variation, experimenter left room and gave teacher instructions over the phone (remote instruction), obedience was reduced to 20.5%
* Ps also pretended to give shocks or gave weaker ones than they were supposed to.

Situational Variables: Location

* He conducted a variation of the study in a run-down building instead of a prestigious university where it was originally conducted.
* this meant that the experimenter had less authority, so obedience fell to 47.5%.
* this is still quite high but it’s less than the original 65%

Situational Variables: Uniform

* In original study, experimenter wore a grey lab coat as a symbol of authority
* In one variation, the experimenter was called away at the start of the procedure, and his role was taken over by an 'ordinary member of the public' (confederate) in everyday clothes.
* Obedience rate dropped to 20%, the lowest of these variations.

Situational Variables A03: Research Support

* A field experiment in NYC was carried out where 3 confederates were dressed in three different outfits - a jacket and tie, a milkman's outfit and a security guard uniform.
* They stood in the street and asked passers-by to pick up litter or give them a coin to pay for the parking meter.
* people were twice as likely to obey the security guard than the confederate in the jacket and tie.

Situational variables A03: Cross-cultural replications

* Milgram's findings have been replicated in other cultures
* For example, amongst Spanish students, an obedience rate of over 90% was found, suggesting that Milgram's conclusions are not limited to american males, but are valid across cultures and apply to females too.
* However, it has been pointed out that most replications take place in Western, developed countries (eg, Spain and Australia), which are culturally not that different from the USA, so we still cannot assume that Milgram's situational variables apply to people everywhere.

Situational Variables A03: Control of variables

* A strength is that Milgram altered one variable at a time (eg, proximity) to see what effect it would have on level of obedience.
* All other procedures and variables were kept the same as the study was replicated over and over again with more than 1000 ps, meaning they were not just one-offs or happened by chance.

Dispositional Explanations A01: The authoritarian personality

* Adorno wanted to understand anti-semitism of the Holocaust.
* They came to believe that a high level of obedience was a psychological disorder so tried to locate causes.

Dispositional Explanations A01: Procedure

* Investigated causes of obedient personality using 2000 middle class white Americans and studying their unconscious attitudes towards other racial groups.
* Developed the F-scale (fascism scale).
* An important item of this is: obedience ans respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn
* Another important item: there is hardly anything lower than a person who does not feel great love, gratitude ans respect for their parents.

Dispositional explanations A01: Findings

* Those who scored high on F-scale identified with strong people and were contemptuous of the weak.
* Conscious of own and others status, showing excessive respect, deference and servility to those of higher status.
* They had no fuzziness between categories of people and has distinct stereotypes about other groups.
* Strong pos correlation between authoritarianism and prejudice.

Dispositional Explanations A01: Characteristics

* Extreme respect and submissiveness for authority
* Contempt for those inferior to them
* Highly traditional attitudes towards sex, race and gender
* Inflexible in their outlook

Dispositional Explanations A01: Origins

* A result of harsh parenting; extremely strict, expecting loyalty, impossibly high standards, severe criticism.
* Conditional love - parents love based on how child behaves.
* This creates resentment and hostility in child, but cant express feelings directly due to fear of reprisals.
* Therefore feelings are displaced onto others seen as weaker = scapegoating.
* Psychodynamic explanation.

Dispositional Explanations A03: Research support

* Interviews were conducted with a small sample of fully obedient ps who scored highly on F-scale, believing there may be a link between obedience and authoritarian personality.
* However, this is merely a correlation, and it is impossible to draw this conclusion.
* There may be a third factor involved, such as having a lower level of education, and may not be directly linked at all.

Dispositional Explanations A03: Limited Explanation

* Any explanation of obedience in terms of individual personality will find it hard to explain obedient behaviour in the majority of a country's population.
* For example, in pre-war Germany, millions of individuals all displayed obedient, racist and anti- Semitic behaviour.
* Despite the fact that they must have differed in their personalities in all sorts of ways. It seems extremely unlikely that they could all possess an authoritarian personality.
* This is a limitation of Adorno's theory because it is clear that an alternative explanation is much more realistic - that social identity explains obedience.
* As Daniel Goldhagen (1996) argued in Hitler's Willing Executioners, the majority of the German people identified with the anti-Semitic Nazi state, and scapegoated the 'outgroup' of Jews.

Dispositional Explanations A03: Political Bias

* The F-scale measures the tendency towards an extreme form of right-wing ideology.
* Christie and Jahoda (1954) argued that this is a politically biased interpretation of authoritarian personality. They point out the reality of left-wing authoritarianism in the shape, for example, of Russian Bolshevism or Chinese Maoism.
* In fact, extreme right-wing and left-wing ideologies have much in common - not the least of which is that they both emphasise the importance of complete obedience to legitimate political authority.
* This is a limitation of Adorno's theory because it is not a comprehensive dispositional explanation that can account for obedience to authority across the whole political spectrum.

Resistance to social influence A01: Social support conformity

* The presence of other dissenting participant who does not conform reduces the pressure to conform
* Their answer doesn't have to be right, just not following the majority
* However, Asch's research showed that if the dissenter conforms again, the naive participant does the same, suggesting this effect is not long lasting

Resistance to social influence A01: Social support obedience

* The presence of another disobeying participant reduces the pressure to obey
* In Milgram's experiment, obedience rates dropped from 65% to 10% in the presence of a disobedient confederate
* Disobedience and nonconformity acts a model to free the naive participant to act from their own conscience.

Resistance to social influence A01: Locus of control

* A concept concerned with internal control vs external control
* Internals believe that things that happen to them are controlled by themselves, such as doing well on an exam because you worked hard
* Internals believe that things that happen to them are controlled by themselves, such as doing well on an exam because you worked hard
* Externals believe that things that happen to them are controlled by things out of control, such as failing an exam because of a badly written textbook.
* There is a continuum with high internal LOC at one end and high external LOC at the other end, with low internal and low external lying inbetween.

Resistance to social influence A01: LOC

* Internals are more likely to be able to resist social influence pressures
* This is because they take personal responsibility for their actions and can base decisions on their own beliefs
* Internals are also more self confident, more achievement orientated, more intelligent and have less need for social approval

Resistance to social influence A03: Research support for resistance to conformity

* Research evidence supports the role of dissenting peers in resisting conformity
* In an Asch experiment it was found that conformity was reduced in the presence of one dissenting participant
* This occurred even when they wore thick glasses and said they have problems judging vision, so they were bound to get the answers wrong.
* This shows that resistance is not motivated by following what someone else says but it enables someone to act from their own conscience and be free from the group.

Resistance to social influence A03: Research support for resistance to obedience

* Research evidence supports the role of dissenting peers in resisting obedience
* In a different study, where participants had to produce evidence in groups used to help an oil company run a smear campaign, 29 out of 33 groups rebelled
* This shows that peer support is linked to greater resistance

Resistance to social influence A03: Research support for LOC

* Research evidence supports the link between LOC and resistance to obedience
* In a repeat of Milgram's study, they measured whether ps were internals or externals.
* They found that 37% of internals did not continue to the highest shock level, whereas only 23% of externals did not continue
* This means internals showed greater resistance to authority
* This increases the validity of LOC explanation

Resistance to social influence A03: Limited role of LOC

* The role of LOC in resisting social influence may have been exaggerated.
* LOC only occurs in new situations, and has very little influence over behaviour in familiar situations where previous experiences are more important
* This means that people who have conformed/obeyed in specific situations in the past are likely to do so again, regardless of high internal LOC
* This suggests LOC can only explain a limited range of situations in resistance to social influence.