Social Influence

• Social influence - Conformity

  • Conformity is yielding to group pressures
• Types of conformity

  • Publicly but not privately conforming and going along with majority influence to gain approval is compliance.
  • Public and private acceptance of majority influence in order to gain group acceptance is identification.
  • Internalisation is the public and private acceptance of majority influence, through adopting the majority groups belief system.
• Explanations for conformity

  • One explanation for conformity is Informational social influence. This is the motivational force to look to others for guidance in order to be right.
  • Normative social influence is the motivational force to be like and accepted by a group.
• Variables affecting conformity

  1. Features of the environment that affect the degree to which people conform are called Situational variables.
  2. Personal characteristics that affect the degree to which people conform are called Individual variables.
  3. As group size increases so does the pressure to conform.
  4. Unanimity is the extent that members of a majority agree with one another.
  5. Task difficulty. As task difficulty increases so does conformity.
• Conformity Study

  • Asch proposed the line study in 1955.
  • His aim was to investigate the degree to which individuals would conform to a majority who gave obviously wrong answers.
  • The procedure involved 123 American male student volunteers. Individual participants where placed into groups between 7 and 9 who were confederates in reality.
  • Findings included : 75% of participants conforming to at least one wrong answer. 5% conformed to all wrong answers.
• Resistance to social influence:

  • The ways that individuals attempt to withstand perceived attempts to threaten freedom freedom or choice is known as resistance to social influence.
• Resistance to social influence:

  • Independence is the lack of consistent movement either towards or away from social expectancy.
  • The consistent movement away from social conformity such as adopting minority beliefs is know as Anti-conformity.
  • Social support is the assistance and solidarity available from / to others.
  • Locus of control is the extent that individuals believe that they can control events in their life.
• Resistance to social influence:

  1. Reactance is the rebellious anger produced by attempts to restrict freedom of choice.
  2. Ironic deviance is the belief that other people's behaviour occur because they've bee told to do something and then lowers their informational influence.
  3. Three other factors affecting influence are systematic processing, personality and morality.
• Internal explanations

  1. Dispositional explanations is the perception pf behaviour as caused by internal characteristics of individuals such as certain personality characteristics.
• Internal explanations

  1. The authoritarian personality is a person who holds rigid beliefs and is submissive to authority figures but hostile to those of lower-status.