Social Influence

Types of conformity: internalisation, identification and compliance

• Aronson defined conformity as a change in a person’s behavior or opinions as a result of real or imagined social pressure

• Kelman (1958) suggested 3 levels of conformity: Compliance (shallow), Identification (intermediate) and internalisation (deep).

1. Compliance is publicly conforming to the group behaviours/ideas, but privately keeping one’s own personal opinions. It results in a temporary change in behaviour.

2. Identification is where an individual values membership of a group and so will conform to their behaviour and ideas publicly and privately in order to feel part of said group, but doesn’t fully agree so will revert to personal ideas/behaviours if separated from the group for long enough. So this form of conformity is temporary, but longer lasting than compliance.

3. Internalisation is the deepest form of conformity. The individual’s personal opinions genuinely change to match those of the group. This is a permanent change in beliefs

Explanations for conformity: informational social influence and normative social influence

The two explanations of conformity are informational social influence and normative social influence.

• Informational social influence (ISI) occurs in situations where the correct behaviour is unclear, so individuals look to the majority for guidance how to behave because they want to be correct. ISI often results in internalisation, that is, permanently adopting the views of the majority.

• Normative social influence (NSI) occurs in situations where individuals want to appear to be normal and one of the majority so that they are approved of and not rejected. NSI often results in compliance, or a superficial change in behaviour without change in personal values.

Variables affecting conformity including group size, unanimity and task difficulty as investigated by Asch

• A piece of research supporting normative social influence (and thus compliance) is Asch’s (1951) study. 

• Aim: Asch wanted to examine the extent to which social pressure from a majority could cause a person to conform. 

• Procedure: Asch’s sample consisted of 50 male students from Swarthmore College in America, who believed they were taking part in a vision test. Asch used a line judgement task, where he placed one real naïve participant in a room with seven confederates (actors), who had agreed their answers in advance. The real participant was deceived and was led to believe that the other seven people were also real participants. The real participant always sat second to last.

• In turn, each person had to say out loud which line (A, B or C) was most like the target line in length

• The correct answer was always obvious. Each participant completed 18 trials and the confederates gave the same incorrect answer on 12 trials, called critical trials. Asch wanted to see if the real participant would conform to the majority view, even when the answer was clearly incorrect.

• Asch measured the number of times each participant conformed to the majority view. 

• Findings: On average, the real participants conformed to the incorrect answers on 32% of the critical trials. 74% of the participants conformed on at least one critical trial compared to 0.04% in a control group, 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.

• Asch interviewed his participants after the experiment to find out why they conformed. Most of the participants said that they knew their answers were incorrect, but they went along with the group in order to fit in, or because they thought they would be ridiculed.

• Conclusions: This confirms that participants conformed due to normative social influence and the desire to fit in.

Evaluation of Asch

• Generalisability- Asch used a biased sample (50 male students from Swarthmore College in America). Therefore, we cannot generalise the results to other populations, for example female students, and we are unable to conclude if female students would have conformed in a similar way to male students. As a result Asch’s sample lacks population validity and further research is required to determine whether males and females conform in the same way.

• Reliability- As a standard procedure was used this study has high internal reliability as it can be easily replicated to obtain the same results.

• Application- Asch’s experiment has low levels of ecological validity. Asch’s test of conformity, a line judgement task, is an artificial task, which does not reflect conformity in everyday life. Consequently, we are unable to generalise the results of Asch to other real life situations, such as why people may start smoking or drinking around friends, and therefore these results are limited in their application to everyday life.

• Validity- Perrin and Spencer (1980) did a replication of Asch’s original study with British engineering students and found over 396 trials that only one student conformed. This means that Asch’s study may suffer from lack temporal validity and have limited population validity, in that participants were American and so may have originally conformed due to the significant political pressure to conform there due to the Red Scare of the 1950s.

• However, engineering students are more familiar with measurement than the general population, so it could be argued that this sample was biased and so the results were invalid.

• However Rosander (2011) supports Asch’s findings. Rosander used Facebook, Twitter, and other online communities to investigate the effect of task difficulty on conformity. Logic and general knowledge questions were posted for participants to answer. Rosander’s confederates would then answer these questions, providing wrong answers to half of the participants. Results showed that participants would conform to the wrong answers, and were more likely to conform to wrong answers the more difficult the questions became.

• This study demonstrates that Asch’s research is still relevant today, and that even when not face to face the desire to conform for normative (and informational) social reasons is still present.

• Asch’s study may have suffered from demand characteristics. This is because Asch’s confederates were not actors, so may have acted differently to the normal participants, causing the participants to pretend to conform because they thought that that was what was expected of them in the experiment, reducing the study’s generalisability and internal validity.

• Ethics- Asch’s research 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 an experiment on 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 would have displayed demand characteristics and acted differently. In addition, Asch’s participants were not protected from psychological harm and many of the participants reporting feeling stressed when they disagreed with the majority. However, Asch interviewed all of his participants following the experiment to overcome this issue.

Asch’s variation studies

• Variation 1: Group size- Asch found only 3% conformity with one confederate, 13% with two confederates, and 33% with three confederates, not increasing past 33% as the group became larger.

• Variation 2: Unanimity- If the confederate gives the right answer just before the participant’s turn to answer, conformity drops to 5.5%. This rate of conformity stayed the same even if the confederate gave a different wrong answer to the rest of the group.This may be because another person going against the majority gives the participant emotional support to dissent.

• Variation 3: Task difficulty- Asch made the difference between the line lengths smaller, and found that conformity increased when the task was more difficult. This is the informational social influence effect.

• A piece of research supporting informational social influence (and thus internalisation) is research is Jenness’ (1932) study. Jenness used an ambiguous situation that involved a glass bottle filled with 811 white beans. His sample consisted of 101 psychology students, who individually estimated how many beans the glass bottle contained. Participants were then divide into groups of three and asked to provide a group estimate through discussion. Following the discussion, the participants were provided with another opportunity individually estimate the number of beans, to see if they changed their original answer.

• The average initial estimate of the male students was 790 beans. After conferring with the other participants this changed to 695 beans. The average initial estimate of the female students was 925 beans. After conferring with the other participants this changed to 878 beans. Jenness found that nearly all participants changed their original answer, when they were provided with another opportunity to estimate the number of beans in the glass bottle. These results demonstrate the power of conformity in an ambiguous situation and are likely to be the result of informational social influence. The participants in this experiment changed their answers because they believed the group estimate was more likely to be right than their own individual estimate, showing informational social influence.

Evaluation

• Jenness’ study lacks mundane realism as estimating the number of beans in a jar is not an everyday task. 

• Only used American students, so ethnocentric and not generalisable to people in other cultures.

Conformity to social roles as investigated by Zimbardo

• A study on internalisation is Zimbardo’s (1973) prison experiment. 

• Aim: Zimbardo aimed to investigate whether the reason for the high levels of aggression observed in American prisons was due to the prisoners’ and/or guards’ dispositions, or due to the situation that was the prison environment itself. 

• Procedure: In order to test this he created a fake prison in the basement of Stanford university. 21 male students rated as the most physically and mentally stable were selected from 75 volunteers who responded to the newspaper advert. They were randomly allocated such that 10 were assigned to be guards, and 11 were assigned to be prisoners. 

• The prisoners were given a realistic arrest at their homes by local police, so were fingerprinted, stripped, and deloused. They were given a basic prison uniform  and an identification number in an attempt to dehumanise them. They had to follow strict rules during the day. Guards worked in 8 hour shifts in groups of three. They had complete control and were given uniforms, clubs, handcuffs, and mirrored sunglasses to prevent eye contact between prisoner and guards. 

• Findings: Prisoners and guards quickly began conforming to their social roles. By two days the prisoner revolted against their poor treatment by the guards and by six days the rest of the two week experiment was cancelled early due to fears for prisoner mental health. 

• Conclusion: Participants in the experiment conformed to their social roles within the prison, showing the situational power of the prison environment to change behaviour.

Evaluation

• Generalisability- There could be cultural/temporal differences in the way guards and prisoner are perceived, as Zimbardo’s sample were Americans in the 1970s and Reichler and Haslam’s sample were English people in the 2010s. Modern English people may perceive the role of a prisoner to be aggressive and disorderly, and a guard to be calm and controlled, whereas the Americans may expect a prisoner to be fearful and obedient, and a guard to be an authoritarian disciplinarian. Therefore this would suggest that whilst both may be valid examples of participants internalising their roles, the procedure and hypotheses may have to be adjusted for different cultures and eras so as to produce reliable results.

• Reliability- Reichler and Haslam (2011) tried to recreate the Stanford Prison study in a programme for the BBC. However in this simulation prisoners became dominant over the guards and became disobedient to the guards who were unable to control their behaviour.

• This suggests that the results of Zimbardo’s study may be down to individual differences. The reason his guards had such control over the prisoners was perhaps because all or most of those randomly assigned to be guards were those with more dominant personalities, and all or most of the prisoners had more submissive/agreeable personalities. 

• Application- Zimbardo’s study can be seen as a failure as despite his findings, as  American prisons remain places of excessive violence on the part of both prisoner and guards, so situational factors continue to affect prisoner behaviour.

• Validity- Zimbardo used his study to argue that the prison situation causes guards to become aggressive, however only ⅓ of the guards were excessively aggressive. ⅓  stayed neutral and another ⅓ actually tried to help the prisoners by relaxing rules and giving out cigarettes. It is thought that prisoner and guards may have been acting according to stereotypes rather than conforming to social roles, imitating depictions of prisoner and guards that they had seen in the media, such as a prison film at the time called Cool Hand Luke, showing controlling and aggressive guards, so study may lack internal validity.

• Ethics- The study was unethical as participants were exposed to psychological harm. This harm could not have been predicted at the outset, but the experiment should have been stopped as soon as it was clear that prisoners were distressed (i.e: on day 2) rather than being allowed to carry on.

Explanations for obedience: agentic state and legitimacy of authority, and situational variables affecting obedience including proximity, location and uniform, as investigated by Milgram

Obedience is complying with the demands of an authority figure

• Milgram (1963) studied obedience. 

• Aim: He wanted to find out if ordinary American citizens would obey an unjust order from an authority figure and inflict pain on another person because they were instructed to.

• Procedure: Milgram’s sample consisted of 40 male participants aged 20-50 from a range of occupations and backgrounds. The participants were all volunteers who had responded to an advert in a local paper, which offered $4.50 to take part in an experiment on ‘punishment and learning’.

• The participants were all invited to a laboratory at Yale University and upon arrival they met with the experimenter and another participant, Mr Wallace, who were both confederates.

• The experimenter explained that one person would be randomly assigned the role of teacher and the other assigned the role of learner. However, the real participant was always assigned the role of teacher. The experimenter explained that the teacher, the real participant, would read the learner a series of word pairs and then test their recall. The learner, who was positioned in an adjacent room, would indicate his choice using a system of lights. The teacher was instructed to administer an electric shock every time the learner made a mistake and to increase the voltage after each mistake.

• The teacher watched the learner being strapped to the electric chair and was given a sample electric shock to convince them that the procedure was real. The learner wasn’t actually strapped to the chair and gave predetermined answers to the test. As the electric shocks increased the learner’s screams, which were recorded, became louder and more dramatic. At 180 volts the learner complained of a weak heart. At 300 volts he banged on the wall and demanded to leave and at 315 volts he became silent, to give the illusions that was unconscious, or even dead.

• The experiment continued until the teacher refused to continue, or 450 volts was reached. If the teacher tried to stop the experiment, the experimenter would respond with a series of prods, for example: ‘The experiment requires that you continue.’ Following the experiment the participants were debriefed.

• Findings: Milgram found that all of the real participants went to at least 300 volts and 65% continued until the full 450 volts. Only 12.5% stopped at 300v. 

• Conclusion: He concluded that the Germans weren’t a different kind of people, and that under the right circumstances ordinary people were just as likely to obey unjust orders.

Evaluation

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• Generalisability- Milgram’s research lacked population validity. Milgram used a bias sample of 40 male volunteers, which means we are unable to generalise the results to other populations, in particular females, and cannot conclude if female participants would respond in a similar way.

• Sheridan & King (1972) carried out a similar procedure but used a puppy as the ‘learner.’  The puppy carried out a learning exercise and each time it made a mistake it would receive an electric shock.  Participants, acting as the teacher, were led to believe that the shocks were becoming increasingly severe, as in Milgram’s original procedure.  In fact the puppy was getting a small shock each time, just enough to make it jump and show obvious signs of receiving a shock.  Eventually the puppy receives an anaesthetic to put it to sleep, and the participants think they’ve killed it.  54% of male and 100% of the female participants continue to give it electric shocks up to the maximum!  The participants can be in no doubt that the puppy is receiving the shocks, so answering Orne & Holland’s first criticism (that participants may have obeyed because they thought the shocks weren’t real), and confirming their second criticism as there were gender differences in obedience, suggesting that Milgram’s study contains beta gender bias as men and women do not conform in the same way.

• Reliability- The study produces reliable results as the procedure is standardised.

• Application- This can explain why the people involved in atrocities such as the Holocaust obeyed despite being asked to do extremely morally impermissible actions

• Validity- Milgram’s study has been criticised for lacking ecological validity. Milgram tested obedience in a laboratory, which is very different setting to real-life situations of obedience, where people are often asked to follow more subtle instructions, rather than administering electric shocks. The task itself has low mundane realism as it is a highly unrealistic task for participants to carry out. 

• Hofling (1966) rang 22 nurses in a hospital ward, claiming to be “Dr Smith” and asking the nurse to supply a patient with 20mg of an unfamiliar drug saying that he would sign off on the form authorising the provision of the medicine later. On the box of the drug it said that 10mg was the maximum daily amount of the drug that should be given. It was against hospital policy to give over the daily recommended limit of drugs without a signed form from a doctor.  Due to the perceived authority of Dr Smith, 21 out of 22 nurses obeyed. So Hofling’s research backs up Milgram’s research.

• As this study was conducted in a real world setting it could be claimed to have higher mundane realism (the task was familiar) and ecological validity (the location was normal).

• As participants knew they were in a study in Milgram’s experiment, they may have suffered from demand characteristics (i.e: figuring out that the shocks probably weren’t real and playing along to try and please the experimenter). As a result we are unable to generalise his findings to real life situations of obedience and cannot conclude that people would obey less severe instructions in the same way.

• Ethics- Milgram’s study has been heavily criticised for breaking numerous ethical guidelines, including: deception, right to withdraw and protection from harm. Milgram deceived his participants as he said the experiment was on ‘punishment and learning’, when in fact he was measuring obedience, and he pretended the learner was receiving electric shocks. In addition, it was very difficult for participants with withdraw from the experiment, as the experimenter prompted the participants to continue. Finally, many of the participants reported feeling exceptionally stressed and anxious while taking part in the experiment and therefore they were not protected from psychological harm. This is an issue, as Milgram didn’t respect his participants, some of whom felt very guilty following the experiment, knowing that they could have harmed another person. 

• However, it must be noted that it was essential for Milgram to deceive his participants and remove their right to withdraw to test obedience and produce valid results. It could be argued that in terms of a costs-benefits analysis the benefits to society of knowledge of the power of obedience outweighed the costs (psychological harm) to a small number of participants, therefore Milgram was right to carry the study out. 

• Furthermore, he did debrief his participants following the experiment and 83.7% of participants said that they were happy to have taken part in the experiment and contribute to scientific research.

Milgram’s variation studies

• Variation 1: Proximity- proximity affects the participant’s awareness of how the shocks are affecting the learner. Proximity was manipulated via physical location and distance. When the learner and the teacher were in the same room obedience dropped to 40%. When the teacher had to place the learner’s hand on the “shock plate” obedience dropped to 30%.

• Variation 2: Location- Legitimate authority influences how likely someone is to obey. When the site of the research was moved from Yale University to an office block in a run-down area obedience dropped to 47.6%.

• Variation 3: Uniform- The use of appropriate clothing also demonstrates the legitimacy of the authority. In the variation where the experimenter is called away due to an ‘urgent phone call’ and the role of experimenter is given to another confederate in normal clothing obedience dropped to 20%.

Evaluation

• A study supporting the third variation is Bickman (1974). Bickman investigated the effect of uniform worn by confederates on obedience. The confederates asked members of the public on the streets of New York to either pay into a parking meter or collect rubbish off the street. Obedience when dressed in a suit was 19%, in a milkman uniform was 14%, and in a guard uniform was 38%. This supports Milgram’s concept that some uniforms have more legitimate authority than others, and as a field experiment it can be argued to have higher external validity and avoids demand characteristics as participants unaware they are in an experiment.

• It can be argued that some variations are less likely to be seen as a legitimate study on memory and learning, so more at risk of demand characteristics. For example the variation with the learner in the same room and having their hand forced onto the plate would require good acting skills to come across as genuine.

• The Agentic state is the idea that the individual believes that they don’t have responsibility for their behaviour as they are acting as on behalf (as an agent) of an authority figure. The Agentic state allows individuals to commit acts that they morally oppose. They will often feel discomfort as a result of their actions but feel that they are unable to resist the demands of the person in authority.

• This is the opposite of the autonomous state where individual’s actions are free from control, and so they feel that they have responsibility for their actions and behave according to their moral values. Moving from the autonomous state to the agentic state is known as the agentic shift.

• Whether or not we obey a person depends on the legitimacy of the authority.

• Legitimacy of authority is the idea that individuals accept that other individuals who are higher up the social hierarchy should be obeyed, that there is a sense of duty in obeying them.

• Legitimacy of authority is learnt in childhood through socialisation processes such as the relationship between parent and child, teacher and student ..etc. This idea extends to suggest that some people have the right to punish/harm others such as the police force and in the criminal justice system.

• It is accepted by most people that legitimacy of authority is needed in order for society to function properly.

Evaluation

• Milgram’s (1963) research demonstrates the power of the legitimacy of authority with the scientist/professor/experimenter occupying a high level in the social hierarchy due to extensive education and respect for science as a discipline. It also demonstrates that the agentic state as often participants would only continue after the experimenter clarified that he was responsible for the situation.

• However, 35% of participants still resisted the authority of the experimenter and refused to deliver the 450v shock to the ‘learner’ in the experiment. If the agentic state was true of all people then all would have given the full shock.

• Blass and Schmitt (2001) demonstrated the strength of the idea of the legitimacy of authority, as when shown videos of Milgram’s study many people placed responsibility for the shocks on the experimenter, not the participant.

• There have been many cases in history that have demonstrated the negative consequences of when powerful individuals use the Agentic state to commit terrible war crimes. For example the Nazi in charge of death camps, Eichmann, claimed that he was only following orders.

Dispositional explanation for obedience: the Authoritarian Personality.

• Theodor Adorno wanted to understand anti-semitism in WW2. Unlike Milgram who argued that we are all capable of extreme obedience, Adorno argued that high levels of obedience resulted from a psychological disorder linked to aspects of personality.

• In the 1950s Adorno studied personality with questionnaires. Questions were designed to show unconscious feelings towards minority groups. After studying over 2000 mainly middle class white Americans, he developed the F scale (F for fascism).

• One of the nine factors measured was authoritarian aggression. That is the tendency to be on the lookout for, and to condemn, reject, and punish people who violate conventional rules. This trait was tested by questions such as “Most of our social problems would be solved if we could somehow get rid of the immoral, crooked, and feeble-minded people”. People then had to choose on a Likert scale how much they agreed with the statement.

• People who scored highly on the F scale showed great respect for people with high social status. They had fixed stereotyped for other groups (usually negative) and identified with “strong” people and disliked “weak” people. They were inflexible with strong, clear ideas of right and wrong with no middle ground.

• Adorno argued that these people had their personalities shaped very early in life by strict, authoritarian parenting and harsh physical punishment. He linked these ideas to Freud’s work. Adorno suggested that this anger and resentment that they felt towards their parents was the displaced onto other, mainly minority groups.

Evaluation

• Milgram and Elms (1966) interviewed some of the participants who had taken part in the first 4 Milgram studies and found that those that had shocked to the full 450v scored higher on the F scale than those who had refused to continue. This shows that Milgram’s research supports Adorno’s ideas.

• An issue with this is that the finding is correlational. Correlation is not causation. It may not be that people with authoritarian personalities are more likely to follow orders. It could be that people on lower incomes are both more likely to follow orders out of desperation to please and thus also score more highly on the F scale.

• Middendorp and Meleon (1990) has found that less-educated people are more likely than well-educated people to display authoritarian personality characteristics. If these claims are correct, then it is possible to conclude that it is not authoritarian personality characteristics alone that lead to obedience, but also levels of education, which therefore undermines the authoritarian personality explanation for obedience as other factors may also play an important role.

• Altemeyer (who worker later in the 1950s) constructed a new rating scale to measure Authoritarian personality, called the Right Wing Authoritarian scale. This fixed many of the problems of the Adorno F scale and showed a consistent correlation between high scores of the RWA and measures of prejudice towards minority groups.

• This study supports the concept of the existence of an authoritarian personality, and gives more valid evidence than Adorno’s work due to stronger questionnaire design.

• Authoritarian personality can be seen as a left wing theory politically, as it identifies many individuals with a conservative political viewpoint as having a psychological disorder.

• The original F scale also has all of its questions written in one direction, meaning that agreeing with all questions will label someone as authoritarian. This is known as response bias.

• Some factors measured by the F scale don’t seem to be linked to fascism, such as “an exaggerated concern for sexual goings-on”.

Explanations of resistance to social influence, including social support and locus of control

• Explanation 1: Social support- Social support is seeing other individuals resisting orders and pressure to conform. This can help increase an individual’s confidence in resisting social influence, both via pressures to conform and orders from authority figures.

• In terms of obedience having others who are defiant around us gives us disobedient role models, challenging the legitimacy of the authority figure. For conformity this creates a small alternative group to belong to, breaking the unanimity of the dominant group.

Evaluation

• In one of Asch’s variation studies he tested unanimity. He found that if the confederate gives the right answer just before the participant’s turn to answer, conformity drops to 5.5%. This rate of conformity stayed the same even if the confederate gave a different wrong answer to the rest of the group.This may be because another person going against the majority gives the participant social support to dissent.

• Allen and Levine (1971) showed the same effect in a similar study even if the non-conforming confederate had thick glasses and stated clearly that he had difficulty seeing.

• Explanation 2: Locus of control- this was suggested by Rotter to be an individual’s sense of personal control over their lives. This can be measured on a scale. Personality ranges from high internal locus of control to high external locus of control.

• Someone with a high internal locus of control has a sense of responsibility for their actions and feels that their actions/choices dictate/control their lives. As a result they feel less concerned about social approval. Therefore someone with a high internal locus of control is much more able to resist pressures to conform or obey. 

• Someone with a high external locus of control feels that their life is controlled by external forces, such as others, fate, or the government, and so feel little responsibility for their actions. As such they are very concerned about social approval. Therefore someone with a high external locus of control is much less able to resist pressures to conform or obey. 

• The majority of people score somewhere in the middle of these two extremes,  with only a few getting scores close to either end.

Evaluation

• Holland (1967) replicated Milgram’s study and assessed participants for internal or external locus of control. 37% of those with an internal locus of control refused to continue to the highest shock level, compared to 23% of those with an external locus of control. This suggests that those with a high internal locus of control are more able to resist orders.

• However, the majority of those in both groups still obeyed so locus of control cannot fully explain why people obey.

• Also whilst high internal locus of control correlated with decreased obedience, correlation is not causation. Another factor, like level of empathy may have affected results.

Other explanations: 

1. People are less likely to conform if agreeing with the majority would have an effect on their integrity (moral belief system). Supporting research- Hornsey found that a person was less likely to go along with a group who were in favour of cheating (i.e. something immoral) than something with no moral consequences. 

2. There are also personality variables that help people resist pressures to conform. Supporting research- Lucas (2006) conducted an experiment similar to Asch using maths problems. High self-efficacy participants (confident in their own abilities) were more independent (conformed less) than low self-efficacy participants even when the problems got more difficult. 

Evaluation of refusal to conform in general:

• 26% of people did not conform in a single critical trial of line length in Asch’s study, 35% of individuals refused to obey the experimenter and shock up to 450v in Milgram’s study.

• Most guards refused to conform to the aggressive guard social role in Zimbardo’s study

• This demonstrates that a significant proportion of people are able to resist social pressure even in intensely pressurising environments.

Minority influence including reference to consistency, commitment and flexibility.

• Minority influence requires individuals to reject majority behaviours/beliefs, and be converted to the views of the minority. The minority attempts to change views through informational social influence (using reasoned arguments to convince members of the majority to change sides), so this is likely as a result of internalisation.

• Three behaviours that a minority will have to adopt to increase their chance of success are consistency, commitment, and flexibility.

• Behaviour 1: Consistency- The minority needs to demonstrate that it is confident in its view. If they repeat the same message over time (diachronic consistency) then the argument seems more powerful.

Supporting research- Moscovici (1969) tested the effect of consistency. Groups consisting of 4 participants and 2 confederates were shown 36 blue slides of different shades in two conditions. In the first the consistent minority of two confederates stated that every slide was green. In the second confederates stated that 24 of the 36 slides were green (inconsistent minority). When the minority was consistent 32% of participants gave the same answer as the minority on at least one trial, and the wrong answer was given by participants on 8.4% of trials.This compares to only 1.25% of trials where the wrong answer was given by participants when the minority was inconsistent, proving that consistency was vital.

• As 68% of participants never agreed with the minority, perhaps only some people are receptive to minority groups.

• Behaviour 2: Commitment- If the minority are willing to suffer for their views and still hold them, then this is likely to cause members of the majority to take them seriously. This (suffering for your views) is known as the augmentation principle. Generic support- The picture of a vietnamese buddhist monk burning himself on a street in Saigon in 1963 to protest the unfair treatment of the Buddhist community in Vietnam at the time. The picture won the 1963 world press photo of the year, and was so popular that in Europe it was sold as postcards, and copies of the image were distributed by the chinese in the millions. Before this picture the plight of the Buddhists in Vietnam was barely known about worldwide, but because the picture was so powerful in demonstrating that the Buddhists were so upset that they were willing to burn themselves to get their cause heard it had a great effect in turning world opinion against the government in Vietnam, and the Vietnamese government fell later that year.

• Behaviour 3: Flexibility- If a minority is seen as totally inflexible in their view (dogmatic) then minorities will not be persuasive. They need the ability to consider valid counter arguments and slightly compromise. 

• While flexibility and consistency seem to contradict each other, in order to seem reasonable and open minded as well as having a clear and stable opinion, there needs to be balance between these two factors. Supporting research- Nemeth (1986) looked at flexibility. He used a group of 3 participants and one confederate in two conditions of a mock jury situation. In the first the confederate (the minority) would show inflexibility, arguing for a low level of compensation for the imaginary victim of a ski lift accident and not changing from that level. In the second the confederate showed flexibility by raising his offer slightly. In this flexible condition the majority were much more likely to lower their compensation level closer to that of the confederates than in the inflexible condition.

• As this was an experimental situation with the participants aware that the ski lift victim was not real, and no money would be paid, we may question the external validity of this experiment.

The role of social influence processes in social change

• Social change is change that happens throughout a society and not on an individual level.

• Minorities can change ideological positions of members of the majority via consistency, flexibility, and commitment.

• The snowball effect is when members of the majority are slowly converted by the minority. As the minority grows in size it attracts new members faster. As the group grows bigger its legitimacy seems stronger. Eventually it grows so large that it is now the majority.  

• The snowball effect is enhanced by Group Membership. Group membership states that we are more likely to have our views changed by a member of an ingroup that we belong to (share characteristics with). This could be age, gender, educational level, sexuality ..etc. Ingroups are more likely to change the position of the majority than outgroups (for example when white people stood with black people in the civil rights movement, it made other white people more likely to re-evaluate their viewpoint).

• A process called social cryptoamnesia occurs after the social change, where individuals who previously held the old view refuse to admit that they held the now unpopular view or resisted the new view. Eventually people forget about the old view, and about the minorities who changed society.

• Governments can bring about social change very quickly by changing the laws and enforcing them since they are a legitimate authority who therefore ought to be obeyed.

Evaluation

• Mass et al looked at heterosexual views of homosexuals. They set up a condition where heterosexual males were trying to convince other heterosexual males about the importance of gay rights, and compared this condition to one in which homosexual males tried to convince heterosexual males about the importance of gay rights. They found that straight men were best convinced by other heterosexual men rather than gay men to change their opinion. This demonstrates the importance of group membership in minority influence.

• This idea could be applied to a number of projects in the real world, such as ensuring that messages about knife crime in underprivileged communities are delivered by members of the community. However, one problem with this is that members of a minority group who are often victimised are not listened to by any of the members of the majority as they see them as the out group, so issues affecting a minority group won’t be resolved unless members of the majority internalise those ideas.

• Smoking in public places such as pubs was common but changed very quickly due to legal changes and fines

• Green issues such as climate change have developed due to better knowledge transmitted by informational social influence.

• The suffragists allowed women and men of all classes to join, whereas the suffragettes were women-only and their membership was mostly restricted to wealthy women. As a result Suffragists were more able to sway the majority into providing votes for women as people saw those in their ingroup (i.e: men saw other men) supporting the cause and so were more likely internalise the idea that votes for women was a good idea.