Social influence

• Social influence is the process by which individuals and groups change each other’s attitudes and behaviours
• Legitimacy of authority is an explanation for obedience which suggests we are more likely to obey people who we perceive to have authority over us due to the position of power that they hold within the social hierarchy
• Three features of an authoritarian personality are:

  • Submissive to superiors
  • Dismissive of inferiors
  • Highly prejudiced
• An authoritarian personality develops from having a harsh parenting style in childhood, consisting of strict discipline, criticism of failings, and impossibly high standards. The child displaces their feelings to others they deem weaker, known as scapegoating
• The F-scale measures the authoritarian personality
• Limitations of the F-scale include:

  • Has acquiescence bias - all questions are worded in the same direction
  • Is politically biased - very right-wing, does not account for left-wing authoritarianism
• Milgram’s original study tells us that people obey those they consider to be authority figures. Obedience to authority is normal behavior in a hierarchically organized society, where individuals obey orders that distress them and go against their moral code
• Two situational variables impacting obedience are:

  • Proximity: physical closeness between the person giving the order and the person receiving it decreases obedience rates
  • Uniform: the outfit the person giving the order wears affects obedience levels
• The agentic state is when individuals obey an order even if they know it's wrong because they feel they are acting for an authority figure and feel no responsibility for their actions
• Factors that keep a person in the agentic state include:

  • Guilt or anxiety about leaving
  • Not wanting to appear rude/arrogant
  • Unwillingness to break commitment to the experimenter
  • Shifting responsibility to the victim
  • Denying the impact of their actions
• Explanations why people resist social influence are:

  • Social support: presence of people helps resist pressures of conforming or obeying
  • Locus of control: a person's perception of control over behaviors, successes, failures, and events
• Internals believe they are responsible for what happens to them and direct their own lives, while externals believe outside forces direct their lives and they lack control
• Deutsch & Gerard proposed two theories to explain conformity:

  • Normative social influence: conforming to fit in and be liked
  • Informative social influence: conforming due to the need to be right or correct
• Identification is when individuals go along with others because they have accepted their point of view and identify with them
• A limitation of Asch’s (1951) conformity study is that it has been criticised for being influenced by the conformist time in America during the 1950s, leading to inconsistent results over time
• Compliance is temporary conformity where a person goes along with the majority in public but disagrees in private, while internalisation is permanent conformity where the person accepts the majority view publicly and privately
• Stages of minority influence include:

  1. Draw attention to beliefs
  2. Show consistency, commitment, and flexibility
  3. Deeper processing of the issue in the majority group
  4. Augmentation principle
  5. The snowball effect
  6. Social cryptomnesia
• Three characteristics of minorities that make them influential are consistency, commitment, and flexibility
• Social cryptomnesia is part of the minority influence process that occurs after the snowball effect, where people have a memory of social change but do not remember how it happened