social influence

• Group size, anonymity and task difficulty are factors that affect conformity.
• Dispositional factors such as personality and expertise also affect conformity.
• Social influence describes how other people affect our opinions, feelings and even behaviours.
• Conformity is a form of social influence that occurs when an individual thinks or acts similar to those around them.
• Conformity is sometimes referred to as majority influence.
• Fashion is a good example of conformity as people conform to the latest trends.
• Conformity may be characterised by public compliance rather than private acceptance and internalisation of the views or behaviours expressed.
• Informational social influence occurs when an individual accepts the information they receive from others to be true.
• Informational social influence involves the changing of both public and privately held beliefs and attitudes as these become internalised.
• Informational social influence is most likely to occur in situations where the situation is ambiguous and the right course of action or behaviour is not clear, when the situation is a crisis or urgent requiring immediate action, and when an individual believes others to be the experts in the situation who are more likely to know what to do.
• Deutsch and Gerrard (1955) believe there are two reasons why people may conform: the need to be right and the desire or need to be liked by others.
• Normative social influence is a type of social influence where we conform to the behaviours of others to fit in or be liked.
• Prosocial behaviour is defined as acting in a way that would benefit other people.
• Bystander behaviour is when people who witness events or emergencies offer to help people who need assistance.
• Bystander apathy is when people choose not to help others in distress.
• Research into prosocial behaviour aims to understand what factors determine whether or not bystanders will help other people.
• Social factors affecting bystander behaviour include the presence of others and the cost of helping.
• When alone, people are more likely to react and help another person in an emergency situation as they have to assume full responsibility for helping a person in need.
• The cost of helping is determined by the potential costs and rewards of helping someone in need.
• People may decide to help based on what help is required, what they believe the rewards to be, and whether the costs outweigh the rewards.
• Similarity to the victim can influence whether bystanders offer assistance as they are more likely to empathise with those in need of help if there are similarities between them.
• Expertise can affect bystander behaviour as people are more likely to help others if they feel they have the skills or expertise required to be able to help them based on the situation.
• Bystanders may still feel concerned and distressed observing someone else in trouble however when other people are present, they may believe that someone else might be more capable of helping, or is more able to help better or more easily than themselves which prevents them from joining in.
• Piliavin’s subway study investigated whether the appearance of a victim would influence whether people helped or not.
• Group size, anonymity and task difficulty are factors that affect conformity.
• Dispositional factors such as personality and expertise also affect conformity.
• Asch’s study of conformity is a key part of the Social Influence and Conformity chapter.
• Social influence describes how other people affect our opinions, feelings and even behaviours.
• Conformity is a form of social influence that occurs when an individual thinks or acts similar to those around them.
• Conformity is sometimes referred to as majority influence.
• People are conditioned into obeying authority figures with little thought, making it more likely that we will follow orders given by them too as they have legitimate authority over us.
• People trust the expertise and social status of authority figures, fearing potential punishments should we not obey.
• Uniforms are associated with positions of authority and have also been shown to increase obedience levels.
• The culture we live in can influence how we think about authority figures, with some research studies finding that individualistic cultures like western societies have lower levels of obedience compared to collectivist cultures.
• Proximity simply means how far away something is from us, with research into social factors affecting obedience finding that the closer we are to an authority figure, the more likely we are to obey them.
• Dispositional factors affecting obedience are internal factors about a person that affect obedience levels, such as high or low self-esteem, confidence levels or intelligence levels.
• Adorno argued that some people develop personalities that make them more obedient than others due to their early childhood experiences, naming this personality type the authoritarian personality.
• Adorno believed the authoritarian personality was shaped in early childhood by parenting that focused on hierarchical and authoritarian parenting styles, where children learn to obey authority and acquire the same attitudes through a process of social learning and imitation.
• Adorno developed the F scale questionnaire to measure people's attitudes and behaviour, with people who scored highly on this scale believed to have authoritarian personalities and thus more obedient.
• Adorno was only able to find a correlation between personality type and obedience, not prove that the authoritarian personality actually caused higher levels of obedience.