social influence

• Conformity is yielding to group pressure.
• Conformity is influenced by a larger, more dominant group.
• Conformity is the majority influence.
• Internalisation is changing a view both publicly and privately because the individual believes the group is right.
• Identification is changing a behaviour for a group to become desirable, normally temporary and not maintained outside the group.
• Compliance is going along with the majority, even if their views aren't shared, they don't want to stand out and fear rejection.
• Moscovici's research cannot be generalised to other populations as it cannot be concluded that males react to minority influence the same way as females.
• Research shows that females are more likely to conform than males, indicating that further research is needed to determine the effect of minority influence on males.
• Minority influence contributes to social change.
• A limitation of Moscovici's research is that it lacks population validity as it uses a bias sample of 172 American female participants.
• Moscovici's research is gynocentric and lacks population validity, as it cannot be generalised to the entire population.
• Informational social influence, or ISI, is the desire to be right.
• Normative social influence, or NSI, is the desire to be liked.
• Asch's research aimed to investigate conformity to others' judgement where the judgement is wrong.
• Asch's experiment involved 7 participants judging line length, with the task being to match the line lengths.
• The control group in Asch's experiment was participants judging the lines in isolation.
• Asch's variations involved increasing group size and unanimity to investigate their effects on conformity.
• Task difficulty in Asch's experiment increased conformity as it reduced the individuals' self-efficacy.
• Asch's experiment was carried out during the 1950s, a time of high conformity, which may limit its generalisability.
• Asch's experiment lacked ecological validity as it was conducted in a lab with good control, minimising the effects of extraneous variables.
• The participants in Asch's experiment were deceived, which related to the ethics issue of deception.
• The sample in Asch's experiment lacked diversity, limiting its population validity.
• At 300 volts, participants in Milgram's study begged to be released.
• Participants in Milgram's study could leave at any point, but there were standardised pods.
• The learner in Milgram's study was an actor and the shocks were fake.
• At 180 volts, participants in Milgram's study could not stand the pain.
• Uniform affected obedience, with a decrease of 10% when the experimenter wore normal clothes instead of a lab coat.
• At 315 volts, participants in Milgram's study were silent.
• A strength of Milgram's situational variables research is that it has high control of variables, as Milgram systematically altered one variable at a time to test effects on obedience.
• A strength of Milgram's situational variables research is that there is research to support it, as Bickman conducted a field experiment to look at the effect of authority on obedience where confederates stood on the street and asked members of the public to perform a small task such as picking up a piece of litter or providing a coin for the parking meter.
• It was argued that Milgram's study actually has low external validity due to temporal validity (it was done a long time ago) and lack of population validity (only used male American volunteers).
• This study has good ecological validity, but lacks other external validities.
• Holing et al. (1966) found that levels of obedience in nurses on a hospital ward to unjustified demands by doctors were very high (21 out of 22 nurses obeyed).
• The study has low internal validity as it's possible that people didn't believe they were actually administering shocks.
• In the variation where a member of the public replaced the experimenter, Milgram recognised that the situation was so contrived that some participants may have worked it out.
• The lab-based relationship between experimenter and participant in Milgram's study reflected wider real-life authority relationships.
• Agentic state theory suggests that when a person feels no personal responsibility for their actions because they believe that they are an agent for the authority figure.
• Social support affected obedience, with an increase of 92.5% when responsibility was removed from the participant.
• Autonomous state theory is the state where a person is responsible for their actions able to act on free will.
• In Milgram's variations, obedience decreased by 46.5% when the location was changed to an abandoned building, decreased by 20.5% when instructions were given by phone, and decreased by 30% when participants were directly inflicting pain.