Social Influence

• The deepest level of conformity is internalisation. This is when both public and private behaviour change to match that of the majority group and it begins to genuinely reflect an individual's own beliefs.
• Identification is the middle level of conformity. Here a person conforms to the behaviour of a role model group but only in their presence.
• Compliance is when a person conforms by changing their behaviour in public to keep the peace but maintains a different private view.
• Normative social influence explains conformity as being due to the desire to fit in with others and avoid rejection. This more commonly results in compliance or a superficial change in behaviour.
• Informational social influence explains conformity as lacking knowledge of what to do so conforming to gain information. This is based on the assumption that the group is correct and more commonly results in internalisation.
• Jeness took 100 participants and had them individually estimate how many beans a glass jar contained. Then they were put into a room with a group and asked to make a group estimate. Then they were asked to estimate again as an individual. Almost all changed their individual guesses by 30-40% to be closer to the group estimate.
• Jeness' study supports informational social influence as it shows people look to others for knowledge when a task is ambiguous and difficult.
• Asch did a study on conformity. He took 7 male participants and asked them all to which line on a card matched one of three lines on another card. The correct answer was always obvious however all participants except 1 were confederate who gave unanimous false answers on purpose on 12/18 trials. Participants conformed to the incorrect answer on 32% of the trials and 78% conformed at least once.
• Asch's study supports normative social influence due to the pressure to conform to society. It also supports informational social influence as some participants doubted their own judgement and copied others in attempt to be correct.
• Asch created variations of his study to test the different variables affecting conformity. Increasing the size of the group increases conformity (3% for one confederate, 13% for two and 32% for three). A lack of group unanimity decreased conformity as the presense of just one partner decreased it by almost 80%. When the difficulty of the task increased, conformity increased due to informational conformity
• In 1973 Zimbardo conducted a very controversial experiment on conformity to social roles called the Standford Prison Experiment. The aim was to see if participants would conform to the roles of prisoners and guards, and if their behaviour was a result of internal dispositional factors or external situational factors.
• The Stanford Prison experiment was carried out in the basement of Stanford university. Zimbardo had the 'prisoners' arrested by real police and forced to wear numbered uniforms. The guards were also given uniforms, sunglasses and truncheons. They were instructed to run the prison without using violence. The experiment was set to last 2 weeks and Zimbardo played the role of superintendant and experimenter.
• The results showed that everyone quickly conformed to their social roles. The prisoners rebelled, but were crushed by the guards. who became psychologically abusive and forced the prisoners to clean toilets with their bare hands and insulted them. 5 of the prisoners left early due to adverse reactions such as going on hunger strike, and the experiment ended after just 6 days.
• Zimbardo concluded that people conformed to social roles despite their own moral principles, therefore situational factors are more responsible for behaviours found. However individual factors mediate the effects of this somewhat.
• Methodological issues with Zimbardo's experiment:

  • conditions were not controlled as experimenters told guards to be more brutal, therefore low internal validity.
  • guards were treated as research confederates so were aware of the circumstances. this could have lead to demand characteristics. However there is evedience to suggest that the guards treated the experiment as a real life situation, e.g. 90% of their conversations were about the experiment.
• Methodological issues with Zimbardo's experiment part 2:

  • The study did not take place in a real prison so the participants did not feel fear and therefore the study lacked ecological validity. However the prisoners really believed they could not leave the experiment so it was similar to prison.
  • Zimbardo only used male college students which reduces the generalisability of the experiment therefore it lacks populataion validity. Furthermore, in 2006 Reicher and Haslam recreated the study with a mix of men of different ages, classes and ethnicities and different results were found.
• The main ethical issues in Zimbardo's study were a lack of flly informed consent, failure to protect participants from harm, debriefing and right to withdraw.