Social Influence

• Normative Social Influence - conforming to opinions/behaviours because you want to fit in and be liked. It is to do with fear of rejection.
• Informational Social Influence - conforming to behaviours/opinions because you want to be right.
• Compliance - surface level conformity. Going along with attitudes and behaviours of a group in public but reverting in private. Superficial type of conformity.
• Identification - conforming to a group’s behaviours in public and private but still retaining your personal beliefs.
• Internalisation - conforming to a group’s behaviours because you agree with them on a deeper level, public and private behaviours are changed permanently.
• Asch's Procedure - showed participants two cards, one with a stimulus line and one with three comparison lines. Participants were asked to match one of the comparison lines to the stimulus line. The answer was unambiguous. Each naive participant was put in a room with 6-8 confederates and each person was asked to say their answer out loud, the naive participant being the last to say theirs. On the first few trials, the confederates gave the right answer, but in the 12 critical trials they gave the wrong answer.
• Asch's Study Key Points:

  • participants were 123 male American undergraduates
  • all confederates were instructed to give the same answer
  • results are as a result of normative social influence
• Asch's Study Findings:

  • naive participant gave a wrong answer 36.8% of the time (due to conforming)
  • 25% of participants did not conform on any trials
  • 75% conformed at least once
  • 5% conformed on every trial
  • Asch effect is now used to describe the extent to which participants conform even when the situation is unambiguous
  • participants were interviewed after and said they conformed due to fear of rejection (NSI)
• Asch's Variations - Group Size:

  • wanted to know whether size of group would be more important than agreement of group
  • he changed the ratio of confederates to naive participants and changed the group size
  • with 3 confederates conformity rose to 31.8%
  • addition of more confederates made little difference
  • small majority is not sufficient for influence to be exerted, but there is no need for a majority of more than three
• Asch's Variations - Unanimity

  • wanted to know if having another non conforming person would affect conformity.
  • introduced a confederate who disagreed with the others who sometimes said the right answer and sometimes said the wrong answer
  • the presence of this confederate led to conformity being reduced by a quarter from the level it was when the majority was unanimous.
  • the confederate allowed the participant to behave more independently
  • the influence of the majority depends to some extent on the group being unanimous
• Asch's Variations - Task Difficulty

  • he made the stimulus line and the comparison lines more similar in length
  • conformity increased under these conditions
  • this suggests that informational social influence plays a greater role when the task gets harder as we turn to others for the right answer due to the ambiguous situation
• Asch's Study - Evaluation

  • A child of its time - Asch's study was repeated with engineering students in 1980 and only one student conformed across 396 trials. This shows that the time when Asch's research was carried out was a conformist time in America so people were more likely to conform. This is a limitation as it means that the Asch effect does not apply to every situation nor across time, so it is not a fundamental feature of human behaviour.
• Asch's Study - Evaluation

  • Artificial situation and task - participants knew they were in a study so may have shown demand characteristics. The task was trivial and there was no reason not to conform, and the groups they were in did not resemble groups we are part of in everyday life. This is a limitation because it means that the findings do not generalise to everyday situations.
• Asch's Study - Evaluation

  • Limited application of findings - Asch only tested men in America. Other research suggests women may be more conformist. The men in the study were from an individualist culture. Similar studies conducted in collectivist cultures (China) have found higher conformity rates. This shows that conformity is sometimes higher than Asch found, and his findings were not representative of all cultures and genders.
• Demand Characteristics - when participants know they are in a trial/study, so try to act in a way to support the aim of the research.
• ISI Evaluation:

  • research support (maths questions - greater conformity when the question was more difficult) - strength
  • individual differences (not everyone is affected by ISI) - weakness
• NSI Evaluation:

  • individual differences (not everyone is affected by NSI. Those who want to be liked more or associated with others more are called nAffiliators) - weakness
  • research support (Asch found that people went along with aloud answers because they were self conscious or scared, but when they wrote down their answers, conformity decreased) - strength
• Zimbardo's SPE - Procedure:

  Emotionally stable students volunteered to take part. They were randomly assigned either to be a guard or a prisoner. Prisoners were arrested in their homes and delivered to the prison, and blindfolded, stripped, searched and issued a uniform and number. The prisoners had to follow 16 rules which were enforced by the guards. The guards had uniforms including sunglasses, keys and handcuffs, and they were told they had complete power over the prisoners.
• Uniform in Obedience

  • uniform signals legitimate authority
  • Milgram used uniform in his study - in some of the trials the researcher was in uniform and in some they weren’t
  • he found that obedience dropped to 20% when the researcher was not in uniform
• Agentic state - a state in which we feel no responsibility for our actions as we believe we are acting for our authority. This reduces the moral strain of our actions and allows us to obey a destructive authority figure.
• An agent is someone in the agentic state. They feel high levels of anxiety as what they are doing is wrong, but they also feel helpless as they have to obey the authority.
• Agentic Shift is the shift from the autonomous state to the agentic state. This happens to someone when they perceive someone else as an authority figure. The other person has more power due to their place in the social hierachy.
• The F scale is used to measure authoritarian personality. Its full name is the ’Potential for Fascism’ scale. It consisted of 30 questions and measured nine personality dimensions to characterise individuals.
• Legitimacy of Authority - explanation for obedience which suggests we are more likely to obey those who we perceive to have authority over us. They have this authority as a result of their place in the social hierarchy.
• Individuals may remain in the agentic state because of binding factors. These are aspects of a situation which allow the person to ignore or minimise the damaging effects of their behaviour and thus reduce the moral strain they feel.
• Authoritarian Personality - tendency to be very respectful and submissive to authority, they are contemptuous of the weak and of those they believe to be inferior to them, believe in traditional values in terms of love, patriotism and religion, conventional attitudes of race, gender and sex, to them everything is black or white.
• Cause of Authoritarian Personality

  • harsh childhood with strict, severe parenting
  • strict discipline, impossible standards, absolute loyalty to parents
  • conditional love
  • the child feels hostile due to these conditions but cannot take it out on the parents, so displaces the anger onto those who are weaker than them (scapegoating)
• Milgram’s Study - Proximity

  • proximity is how far the ’teacher’ was from the ‘learner’ in the study
  • he studied this by placing the teacher and learner in the same room so the teacher could see the impacts of the electric shocks on the learner
  • this reduced obedience to 40%
  • the closer the teacher was to the student, the lower the obedience rate
  • the further the teacher was from the experimenter, the lower the obedience rate
• Locus of Control - the sense we each have about what directs events to happen in our lives. Internals believe that they are in control of what happens in their lives and and externals believe that they are not responsible for what happens in their lives and they are out of control of what happens.
• People with an internal locus of control are less likely to obey or conform as they are more likely to make decisions based on their own beliefs
• People with an external locus of control are more likely to conform and obey as they have less confidence in themselves and feel out of control of what will happen to them so turn to others to feel validated by society.
• Zimbardo’s SPE Findings

  • guards behaviour became a threat to the prisoner’s psychological and physical health
  • The study ended after 6 days instead of 14
  • After 2 days, prisoners began to rebel
  • Guards frequently harassed the prisoners
  • 3 prisoners were released within the first 4 days due to signs of psychological disturbance
  • 1 prisoner went on a hunger strike and was punished by being put in the hole (a tiny dark closet)
  • Guards identified more closely with their role and their behaviour become brutal and aggressive
• Zimbardo’s SPE Conclusions

  • guards, prisoners and researchers all conformed to their role within the prison
  • the simulation revealed the power of situations in influencing people’s behaviours
• Zimbardo’s SPE Aims

  • to answer the question:
  • do prison guards behave brutally because they have sadistic personalities, or is it the situation that creates such behaviour
  • to investigate the impact of situational factors and power dynamics on human behaviour
• Zimbardo’s SPE Evaluation

  • control
  • Only emotionally stable ppts were chosen and randomly assigned roles to eliminate the impact of individual differences
  • lack of realism
  • Researchers argue that ppts were acting rather than conforming to a role - one guard said he based his character off a film character
  • However 90% of conversations in the study were about prison life
  • dispositional influences
  • Fromm accused Zimbardo of exaggerating the impact of the situation on behaviour - only 1/3 of the guards behaved brutally
  • Zimbardo’s conclusion may be overstated
• Milgram’s Study Aims

  • why such a high proportion of German people supported Hitler’s actions during the Second World War
  • were Germans more obedient?
• Milgram’s Study Procedure

  • 40 male participants between 20-50 recruited through advertisements
  • a confederate was always the ‘learner’ and the ppt was always the teacher, and an experimenter (confederate)
  • learner strapped in chair in another room wired with electrodes
  • teacher had to give the learner an increasingly severe electric shock every time the learner made a mistake (the shocks were not real)
  • shock level started at 15 volts and went to 450
  • experimenter pushed teacher to keep shocking the learner, even after learner stopped responding
• Milgram’s Study Findings

  • no participants stopped below 300 volts
  • 12.5% stopped at 300 volts
  • 65% continued to 450 volts
  • participants showed signs of extreme tension (sweating, trembling)
  • 3 ppts had uncontrollable seizures
  • the findings were unexpected
  • 84% reported afterwards that they were glad to have participated
  • the participants were debriefed afterwards
• Milgram’s Study Evaluation

  • low internal validity
  • ppts may have guessed that the shocks weren’t real and so Milgram didn’t test what he wanted to
  • voice tapes of the ppts shows they had doubts
  • real shocks to a puppy showed that people still behave the same way with real shocks
  • good external validity
  • the lab environment reflects real life authority relationships
  • nurses research supports the findings + shows generalisability
  • supporting replication
  • french game show replicated the study and found the same conclusions
• Milgram’s Study Variations: Proximity

  • in the original study teacher and learner were in adjoining rooms
  • in this variation they were in the same room
  • obedience dropped from 65% to 40%
  • in a more extreme variation the teacher had to force the learners hand onto an electroshock plate - obedience dropped to 30%
  • in another variation experimenter left the room and gave instructions by phone - obedience dropped to 20.5%