social influence

• what is social influence?

  any changes in an individuals thoughts, feelings and behaviors caused by other people
• what is conformity?

  a form of social influence that results from exposure to majority position and leads to compliance with that position and is the tendency for people to adopt the behavior, attitudes and values of other members of a reference group
• who created the two step process of conformity (dual dependency: social approval and information)?

  Deutsch and General (1955)
• what is normative influence?

  when an individual conforms due to the belief that they will be ostracised or perceived negatively if they do not
• what is informative influence?

  a type of social influence in which individuals modify their behavior, opinion or beliefs based on information they received from others
• what is difference between normative and informational influence?

  • normative influence private opinions do not change however informational influence leads to private opinions change
• what did Schutiz (2008) find about normative influence?

  Schutiz (2008) found that hotel guests exposed to normative message thus 75% of guest used their towels used their towels each day reducing towel each day reducing towel usage by 25% suggesting people will change their behaviors out of desire to fit in
• what did Witren Brink and Henly (1996)?


  when exposed to negative informational messages about African Americans it was later reported there were more negative beliefs about Black people
• what is compliance?

  A superficial change in an individual's behavior to comply with that of a group which only exists in the presence of the group and the individual's internal beliefs remain unchanged
• what is internalisation?

  A complete change in the individual's behavior and internal beliefs to conform with a group. These changes exist outside the presence of a group.
• what is identification?

  A change in the individuals behaviour and internal beliefs to that of a specific group but only in the presence of that group
• who pioneered the idea of conformity?

  Solomon Asch
• what was Asch's study?

  (1956) Asch asked student volunteers to take part in a visual discrimination task. Unbeknownst to the all but one of the participants were confederates
• what was the aim of Asch study?

  to see how the real participant would react to the behaviors of the confederates
• what was the procedure of Asch's study?

  123 male US undergraduates were tested. participants were seated around a table and asked to look at three lines of different lengths. They took turns to call out which of the three lines they thought was the same length as a standard line with the real participant answering second to last
• how did the procedure investigate conformity?

  despite the obvious solution to the task the confederate were instructed to give the sane incorrect answer. Asch was in interested in where the real participant could stick to what they believe or conform to the pressure of the majority
• what was Asch's findings?

  • on the 12 critical trials conformity rate was 33%
  • there were individual differences in conformity rates
  • 1/4 never conformed on any critical trials
• how did Asch investigate the results of his main study

  • Asch conducted a control condition without the distraction of confederates giving wrong answer. In this condition he found that participants made mistakes 1% of the time
  • however this didn't explain the high levels of conformity in the main study
• what happened when Asch interviewed his participants after?

  • He discovered that majority of the participants who conformed had continued to privately trust their own perceptions and judgements but changed their public behaviour
• How did Asch advance of his original study?

  carried out a number of variations of his original stud to find out which variables had the most significant effects on the level of conformity shown by his participants
• what was 3 key variations of this study?

  1.)Group size

  2.)The unanimity of the majority

  3.) difficulty of the task
• What happened when Asch changed group size?

  • very little conformity when there were 1-2 confederates
  • however under the pressure of three the conformity responses increase to 30%
  • further increasing of the majority did not increase the level of conformity substantially
• what did the findings of his group size study show?

  size of the majority has an effect to an extent
• what were the problems with the group size study?

  Campbell and Fairey (1989) suggest that groups size might have a different effect depending on the type of judgement being made and the motivation of the individual