Social Influence: Resistance to Social Influence

• Locus of control


  A measurement of an individual's sense of control over their lives, ie 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
• Locus of control


  • Internal (more control)
  • External (less control)
• Internal locus of control

  • Behaviour is caused by their own personal decisions and effort
  • They take more responsibility for their own actions and see themselves as having more control
  • They are more likely to be leaders, not followers
• External locus of control

  • Behaviour is caused by luck or fate
  • They believe that the majority of their life events are beyond their control
  • They are more likely to act on behalf of another (i.e. as their agent) and shift responsibility onto this individual
  • They are particularly susceptible towards obedience
• High internal locus of control thought


  • I won the award because I worked hard for it
• Low external locus of control thought


  • I won the award because it was meant to be-it was my destiny
• Locus of control


  Obedience - those with an external locus of control are more easily persuaded and more likely to conform
• Locus of control


  Social responsibility - those with an internal locus of control scored higher on measures of social responsibility
• The locus of control explanation is only valid for novel situations, as suggested by Rutter
• There is research evidence supporting the link between locus of control and social responsibility
• Research evidence


  • Oliner and Oliner (1988) interviewed two groups of non-Jewish people who had lived through the holocaust. They also interviewed 406 people who protected and rescued Jews from Nazis and 126 people who did not. The rescuers were found to have an internal locus of control and also scored higher on measures of social responsibility.
• The link between locus of control and resistance to obedience

  Measures of social responsibility may be more important/influential
• The locus of control explanation is only valid for novel situations, as suggested by Rutter
• Previous experiences are always more influential than LOC when an individual is making a decision as to how to act
• LOC is a limited explanation for only some cases of obedience
• Social support


  When one of the confederates did not conform, and gave the actual correct answer, conformity levels in the participant dropped to one quarter of what they were when the majority had been unanimous
• This is not just due to the lack of unanimity of the majority, but the fact that the answer supports the participants true answer, it provides the participant with social support through also providing an alternative source of information
• It gave them more confidence in their own perception by providing a small amount of confirmation of their answer, which is often enough to encourage the person to reject the majority position
• Resistance to obedience in this case would be due to social support, as facilitated by normative social influence and informative social influence
• In a variation of Milgram's study, where there were two other participants (who were actually confederates) and disobeyed the experimenter, the presence of the other person caused the level of obedience to reduce to 10%
• This shows that the social support provided from the other participants gave them the confidence to reject the position of authority
• Gamson et al also gave support to the idea that larger groups provide a stronger social support system, which makes resisting obedience/social influence much easier