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 social influence.
• 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.
• The Asch lab experiments happened in 1950’s USA which was experiencing paranoia about anything seen to be different due to the Cold War. This means that the time and place when the research was carried out might have affected the findings as conformity may have been unusually high and so they should not be generalised to the current era.
• Mori and Arai did a similar study to Asch but avoided demand characteristics by eliminating confederates. They used a task which required glasses and gave 1 out of 4 participants a pair that would really make them see something different to the majority. The study involved men and women. For women, the findings matched Asch’s findings suggesting demand characteristics were not an issue. However, the male participants in the study were not swayed by the majority view. The difference between genders may have been because participants were friends and not strangers as they were in the Asch study.
• Asch’s study raises ethical issues of informed consent. This is because the participants were deceived and told that the experiment was about visual perception. Additionally, the participants were deceived into believing that the confederates were actually other participants. However, this deception was necessary to test natural social behaviour, as if the participants had known the aim demand characteristics would have ruined the validity of the experiment and Asch would not have gained such valuable insights into what affects conformity.
• Deindividuation is a social process that is part of conformity to social roles in which people, when placed in group situation, no longer act as individuals. They no longer behave in the same way that they would when alone and instead pass all responsibility for their behaviour to the group. Their identity becomes that of the group. This happens even faster if the group have a common identity which the individual can hide behind or lose themselves in, for instance a uniform.
• Although Zimbardo checked that his participants were psychologically ‘normal’ he did use a very narrow sample of male American students. This means his findings cannot be generalised to how all people conform to social roles as his participants were not representative. To confirm this, other psychologists replicated the study in 2006 using 15 British men of mixed age, class and ethnicity who had been through screening to make sure that they were well-adjusted. Their results contradicted the findings of Zimbardo; the guards did not identify with their status and refused to impose authority.
• Dispositional explanation of obedience:

  • Adorno proposed the idea of the authoritarian personality type
  • This is a group of dispositional traits developed due to strict parenting which teaches a child to obey authority blindly.
  • The individual can't show hostility towards their parents so they displace this hostility onto safer targets such as ethnic minorities.
  • They blindly obey authority and expect other to obey them; they are negative towards those beneath them ('scapegoating') and obedient towards those above.
  • this trait is measured on a questionnaire which Adorno called the ‘fascist scale’.
• dispositional explanation of obedience AO3:

  Elms and Milgram followed up with some of the original Milgram participants and asked 20 obedient participants (full 450 volts) and 20 disobedient participants, who refused to continue, to complete Adorno’s F scale. Participants were also asked questions about their relationship with their parents. It was found that the obedient participants scored higher on the F scale. In addition, the results also revealed that obedient participants were less close to their fathers during childhood which was the opposite for disobedient participants.
• The concept of an ‘authoritarian personality’ has been criticised as not everyone with a strict upbringing is a fascist and a blind follower of orders. Nor does the concept explain the obedience of entire social groups/societies whose members are all likely to have different personalities. The link between these traits and obedience is also only correlational so we cannot claim cause and effect, just a link. Other variables may be to blame e.g. linked to people who are not well educated and of low social class.
• Milgram procedure: Lab experiment at Yale with 40 men who answered an ad and were paid. They were told it was a test of learning but was actually obedience. ‘The Learner’ was attached to a generator that the participant thought gave him an shock when they pressed a button. The participant was taken into a separate room where a shock generator was located. It had switches from 15V - 450V with ratings of "slight shock" - "XXX". The teacher had to give learner a shock at any wrong answer. They could hear the learner in the next room reacting; responses from learner were actually taped.
• Milgram results:

  Orders were given by an experimenter in a lab coat (authority figure) and included prods when the participant did not wish to continue: ‘The experiment requires that you continue’. Psychiatrists predicted that only 0.1% would go ‘all the way’ but in reality 65% gave the max of 450v and 100% went to 300V. Secondary effects on participants were signs of stress: trembling, sweating, stuttering. Milgram concluded that obedience was due more to situational factors than dispositional.. Under the right circumstances ordinary people will obey unjust orders.
• Situational variables affecting obedience (Milgram):

  • proximity: when learners were in the same room as teachers obedience dropped from 65% to 450v to 40%. When learner could not be seen/heard it increased to 100%
  • location: when at a run-down office block obedience dropped from 65% to 48%
  • uniform: when experimenter wore normal clothes instead of lab coat it dropped to 20%.
• Milgram AO3:

  • Ecological Validity - artificial set up of Milgrams’ lab experiment did not fully resemble real life, should be cautious when generalising Milgrams’ findings beyond the investigation. Although, research into obedience in real life situations, such as Hofling (1966) where 21/22 nurses were willing to administer a lethal dose of medication to a patient at the telephone orders of a doctor, support the ecological validity of Milgrams’ study as they find similar results.
• Milgram AO3:

  • Population validity - sample was very small and only contained American males so unrepresentative of other groups and cannot be generalised. Milgram only used males as he wanted to generalise to soldiers in the army, like in Nazi Germany. Since his original study, replications have been carried out with female participants and finding show the rate of obedience was 65% - exactly the same as in male samples suggesting his results do have population validity.
• Milgram AO3:

  • Cultural Validity - Milgram carried out his research in America which is an individualistic culture. It may be that in other more collectivists cultures obedience rates would be even higher and so his results may not be generalisable. There have been replications in different countries which find similar results, but most of this research has been done in western, individualistic cultures. More research should be done in collectivist cultures to extend the cultural validity of the findings.
• The three explanations of obedience are dispositional (Adorno) and legitimacy of authority and the agentic state which are both situational (Milgram).
• The Agentic State AO1:

  Milgram explained that people have two states of behaviour in a social situation. The autonomous state is where people direct their own actions, and take responsibility. The agentic state is where people allow others to direct their actions, and they pass off the responsibility for the consequences to the person giving the orders. He suggested that two things must be in place for a person to enter the agentic state: the authority must appear legitimate and the person must believe that the authority will take responsibility for their actions.
• The Agentic State AO3:

  • Milgram carried out variations relating to how aware the participant was of the consequences of their actions. The effect of the participant being able to see (40%) or having to touch the victim (30%) was enough to reduce obedience from the original 65%. It may be that, confronted with the victim’s suffering, the participant felt greater personal responsibility for their actions and this forced them from an agentic to an autonomous state.
• The Agentic State AO3:

  • Hofling et al conducted a field experiment of obedience in a natural setting. Their participants were 22 nurses who were unaware that a study was taking place. The nurses received a phone call whilst they were working from a ‘Dr Smith’, who instructed them to give twice the maximum dose of a drug that could have been very harmful to the patient. However, 21 out of the 22 nurses attempted to give the medication.
• Legitimacy of Authority AO1:

  • LOA focuses on the context and the genuineness of authority figure. This is where someone is obeyed because it is thought they have the right to give the order. E.g. the person obeying may believe the authority figure has the power to administer sanctions for disobeying.
  • This happens because we are socialised to follow orders given by LA figures with high status. People make judgements about an authority figure’s legitimacy, based on evidence available in the setting. E.g., people in uniforms are often perceived to be legitimate authorities.
• Legitimacy of Authority AO3:

  • use previous info on Milgram variations
  • Bickman carried out a field experiment where an experimenter approached passers-by on a street and asked them to carry out small, inconvenient tasks. They were dressed either in a milkman’s uniform, a guard’s uniform or a suit. Bickman found that PPs were twice as likely to obey the orders when the experimenter was dressed in a guard’s uniform.
  • Research support for the LOA comes from both lab and field experiments. This creates greater support for the theory through both good internal and external validity.
• The explanations for resistance to social influence are social support and locus of control.
• Social Support AO1:

  • Defiance is more likely if others are seen to resist the influence. Seeing others disobey or not conform gives the observer confidence to also resist. In conformity the other resister acts as an ally and breaks the unanimity of group. This reduces the amount of normative social influence as it is less painful to be rejected if we are not alone. In obedience the other resister acts as a disobedient role model who challenges the legitimacy of authority figure. If an authority figure were truly legitimate in their position then others would not disobey them.
• Social Support AO3:

  • Milgram - variation in which two confederates were paired with the real participant and declared early on that they would go no further. Under these conditions only 10% of participants gave the maximum 450 volt shock. Confederates were disobedient role models which reduced the legitimacy of the authority figure.
  • Asch - when one other person gave a different answer from the others, the conformity of the participant dropped. The social support of the other person who went against the majority reduced the normative influence of the group and therefore the fear of rejection.