social influence

• Normative social influence occurs when people conform to the expectations of others in order to gain social approval or avoid social disapproval.
• Informational social influence occurs when people seek information from others about how they should behave in ambiguous situations.
• Types of conformity:

  • Compliance - public but not private,agreeing with the majority in order to be liked/respected. (football team)
  • Identification - Public & private,agree when with them but once you leave no longer agree (army.)
  • Internalisation - Public & private,agree even when not with them (Religion.)
• Asch's Conformity Experiment - Participants were asked to judge which line was same length as another line. The other participants gave wrong answers on purpose so that the participant would feel pressured to give the wrong answer too.
• Evalution of Asch -

  • Lab - lacks eological validity
  • Androcentric - male only
  • Lack population validity
  • Control over extranous variables
  • Can be replicated
• What are some other variables asch looked at?

  Group size (one = low, two = 13, three = 32) ,unamity (dropped to 5.5.%) and task difficulty.
• Zimbardo

  • Converted a basement of the Stanford University psychology building into a mock prison.
  • In order to understand the behaviour found in prisons and the level the individuals conformed to their roles.
  • Prisoners were treated like every other criminal, being arrested at their own homes without warning e.t.c
  •  Each prisoner had to be called only by his ID number 
• Evalution of Zimbardo - bad

  • Roles were randomly allocated
  • Pyschologically tested before and after
  • Dehumanisation of prisons (sleep depriavtion)
  • Paid to contribute (demand characteristics)
  • Zimbardo played a dual role
  • Androcentric
• Evalution of zimbardo - good

  • Supposed to be 2weeks after 6 days
  • High ecological validity