Resisting Social Influence

• The pressure to conform can be resisted if other people who aren't conforming are present, as we saw in Asch's study
• Define social support

  The presence of people who resist conformity enabling a naïve participant to follow their own conscience as the confederate acts as a "model" of independent behaviour
• Pressure to obey can be resisted if another person disobeys, for example in one Milgram's variations rate of obedience dropped from sixty five% to 10% when the participant was joined by a disobedient confederate
• The disobedient model challenges the legitimacy of authority figure as the person acts as a "model" of dissent
• Rotter proposed the Locus of Control as a concept that refers to what?


  The sense we each have about what directs events in our lives
• What do internals believe?

  That they are mostly responsible for what happens to them

  e.g. Revising hard meant doing well in a test
• What do externals believe?

  The events that happen in their lives are a matter of luck or other outside forces

  e.g. did bad on a test as questions were hard
• People aren't just either internal or external, they vary in their position on the continuum
• People with higher internal locus of control are what?

  More likely to be able to resist pressure and are more independent as they base decisions on their beliefs or are more self-confident
• One limitation of the link between LOC and resisting social influence is the evidence from Twenge that challenges the link.
• Twenge analysed data from American Locus of Control studies and found that over time people became more resistant to obedience and more external.
• It's surprising that over time people became more external and resistant as resistance is typically linked to internal Locus of Control, so it is expected that people would have become more internal over time.
• The data from Twenge suggests that LOC is not a valid explanation of how people resist social influence.