social influence

• social influence = the ways external social factors alter our behaviour
• NSI and ISI may not be completely exclusive, as suggested by Deutsch and Gerrard's 'Two Process Model'
• It may be more beneficial to look at NSI and ISI as complementary, as opposed to mutually exclusive mechanisms
• Asch's study

  • 123 male American undergraduates in groups of 6; consisting of 1 true participant and 5 confederates
  • Participants and confederates were presented with 4 lines; 3 comparison lines and 1 standard line
  • Confederates would give the same incorrect answer for 12 out of 18 trials
  • Asch observed how often the participant would give the same incorrect answer as the confederates versus the correct answer
• Group size

  An individual is more likely to conform when in a larger group
• Unanimity of majority

  An individual is more likely to conform when the group is unanimous i.e. all give the same answer, as opposed to them all giving different answers
• Task difficulty

  An individual is more likely to conform when the task is difficult
• Zimbardo's study

  • 24 American male undergraduate students
  • Participants were randomly issued one of two roles; guard or prisoner
  • Guards began to harass and torment prisoners in harsh and aggressive ways
  • Prisoners would only talk about prison issues and snitch on other prisoners to the guards
• Agentic state

  When a person believes that someone else will take responsibility for their own actions
• Agentic shift

  When a person shifts from an autonomous state (the state in which a person believes they will take responsibility for their own actions) to the agentic state
• Legitimacy of authority

  How credible the figure of authority is. People are more likely to obey them if they are seen as credible in terms of being morally good/right, and legitimate
• Expert authority

  The authority of the experimenter in Milgram's study, who was seen as legitimate as he was a scientist and therefore likely to be knowledgeable and responsible
• Agentic state


  When people believe they are acting on behalf of an authority figure, rather than taking personal responsibility for their actions
• Legitimacy of authority

  How credible the figure of authority is. People are more likely to obey them if they are seen as morally good/right, and legitimate (i.e. legally based or law abiding)
• Students are more likely to listen to their parents or teachers than other unknown adults
• Expert authority

  When the authority figure is seen as knowledgeable and responsible, like a scientist
• The study suffered from demand characteristics and lacked ecological validity
• The sample only consisted of American male students, so the findings cannot be generalised to other genders and cultures
• There was a lack of fully informed consent due to the deception required
• Participants were not protected from stress, anxiety, emotional distress and embarrassment
• Proximity

  Participants obeyed more when the experimenter was in the same room (62.5%) compared to being in a different room (20.5%)
• Location

  Participants obeyed more when the study was conducted at a prestigious university
• Uniform

  Participants obeyed more when the experimenter wore a lab coat
• Demand characteristics were particularly evident in the uniform condition
• Authoritarian personality

  Belief that people should completely obey or submit to their authority figures, and suppress their own beliefs
• Fixed cognitive style

  Tendency to adopt absolutist/'black and white' thinking and not challenge stereotypes
• Scapegoating

  Displacing anger with parents onto seemingly 'inferior' others
• The F-scale used to measure authoritarian personality is susceptible to acquiescence bias
• Adorno's psychodynamic theory

  A person's personality traits and attitudes as an adult stemmed from childhood influences such as that of one's parents
• Scapegoating

  Child with overly harsh and disciplinarian parents displaces their anger with their parents onto seemingly 'inferior' others
• On a surface level, the child would idolise their parents, but on an unconscious level, they would fear and despise them, and so arises the need to displace such anger
• The child would be more likely to target their displaced anger on those who seem weak and unable to defend themselves, such as minority groups
• Reaction formation

  The process where the child displaces their anger onto seemingly 'inferior' others
• The F-scale is particularly susceptible to acquiscence bias, which describes the phenomenon of respondents always responding in the same way using the scales provided, regardless of the content shown in the scales
• The Authoritarian Personality may not be able to explain all cases of obedience across the whole political spectrum, because it technically measures the likeness between an individual to Fascism (far-right on the political scale), but left-wing authoritarianism is also present, such as Bolshevism, and has been ignored by the current theory
• There are more similarities between the two ends of these spectrums than differences, most notably a large emphasis on utmost respect for legitimate authority, which suggests that Fascist-like views can be found across the whole spectrum, which the Authoritarian Personality does not account for
• The Authoritarian Personality has little ecological validity because it cannot explain many real-life examples of mass obedience, such as the whole German population during Nazi occupation, who likely shared the same struggles in life and displaced their fear about the future onto a perceived 'inferior' group of people, through the process of scapegoating
• Locus of control

  A measurement of an individual's sense of control over their lives, i.e to what extent they feel that events in their lives are under their own personal control, versus under the control of other external powers like fate
• Internal locus of control

  People with more of an internal locus of control conform and obey less, because they take more responsibility for their own actions and see themselves as having more control than someone with a high external locus of control, and so are more likely to make decisions based on their own moral code, as opposed to someone else's
• External locus of control

  People with an external locus of control believe that the majority of their life events are beyond their control, which means that they are more likely to act on behalf of another (i.e. as their agent) and shift responsibility onto this individual, making them particularly susceptible towards obedience