Social Influence

• Social influence


  The process by which an individual's attitudes, beliefs or behaviours are modified by the presence of other people
• Types of social influence

  • Majority influence (conformity)
  • Minority influence
  • Obedience to authority
• Conformity (majority influence)


  A change in behaviour or belief as a result of real or imagined group pressure
• In-groups


  Groups with which we identify
• Out-groups


  Groups that we do not belong to
• Social norms


  Implicit or explicit rules of behaviour that are set culturally
• Types of conformity


  • Compliance
  • Identification
  • Internalisation
• Compliance


  Conforming in order to be liked, or to avoid ridicule or social exclusion
• Identification


  Public and private acceptance of majority influence in order to gain group acceptance because you value membership of the group
• Internalisation


  The person fully accepts the views of the majority, and conforms publicly and privately
• Kelman (1958) demonstrated the difference between private and public conformity
• Asch's study mainly demonstrated compliance
• Jenness's study demonstrated internalisation
• Asch's study


  • To find out if participants would yield to social influence in a group task, to the extent that they would give an obviously incorrect answer in an unambiguous situation
  • 123 male students were recruited to take part in an 'eye test'
  • Participants conformed to the majority and gave an obviously incorrect answer on 37% of the critical trials
  • 74% of participants followed the incorrect majority at least once, and only 26% never conformed
• Asch found conformity was minimal with only one confederate, rising to 13% with 2 confederates, and up to 32% with 3
• Asch found that with just one rebel going against the group, the real participant was much less likely to conform (5% vs. 32%)
• Asch found that when the lines were more similar in length, conformity increased, as people looked to others for information
• Informational social influence (ISI)


  Conforming based on the desire to be correct
• Normative social influence (NSI)

  Conforming based on the need for social approval
• Jenness's "Jellybean study" demonstrated informational social influence
• Lucas et al (2006) found that participants who were given hard maths problems were more likely to conform to wrong answers, but only if they lacked confidence in their own maths skills
• Perrin and Spencer found that engineering students showed very low conformity, while young offenders showed higher levels of conformity, similar to Asch's study
• Bond and Smith found that collectivist cultures had higher rates of conforming compared to individualist cultures
• The Stanford Prison Experiment

  • To investigate how readily people would conform to the roles of guard and prisoner in a role-playing exercise that simulated prison life
  • The guards became repressive and sadistic, finding ways to humiliate and punish the prisoners
  • The prisoners were first rebellious, but became depressed and apathetic after the rebellion was crushed
  • The whole experiment was stopped after only 6 days due to the extreme reactions
• Zimbardo concluded that the brutality was due to situational factors, but there were individual differences between the guards, with only 1/3 described as sadistic
• A later study found that people who responded to an advert on 'prison life' had significantly higher levels of aggressiveness, authoritarianism, Machiavellianism, narcissism, and social dominance, and they scored lower on measures of empathy and altruism than other volunteers
• The 'BBC Prison Study' (Reicher and Haslam, 2006) got very different results from Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment
• Zimbardo's decision to interact with prisoners and guards by acting as the 'prison warden' in the experiment compromised the validity of the study
• The procedure Zimbardo used is not reliable: it can't be replicated fully due to ethical concerns, moreover, later studies such as the 'BBC Prison Study' (Reicher and Haslam, 2006) got very different results
• The study is applicable to real life situations where power imbalances led to brutal abuses. In particular, photographs from the US military prison at Abu Ghraib in Iraq showed notable similarities to the Stanford study (although far worse)
• The validity of the study was compromised by Zimbardo's decision to interact with prisoners and guards by acting as the 'prison warden' in the experiment. This means that he was unable to be objective, and may have influenced the behaviour of the guards in the direction of his hypothesis
• There are multiple ethical issues with this study. The participants experienced psychological harm and were deceived about aspects of the study, such as their 'arrests' at home. In fact, this study led directly to the development of ethical guidelines for psychology researchers
• Obedience


  The result of social influence where an individual acts in response to a direct order from an authority figure
• History has shown that people are capable of horrifying acts when following orders. Research on obedience has mainly been aimed at this aspect (destructive obedience), as opposed to obedience that is prosocial, or beneficial to society
• Conformity vs Obedience


  By comparison with conformity, obedience often involves only public compliance (though conversion may occur in fanatical following of religious or political leaders). Individuals are also usually consciously aware they have obeyed an authority figure, who may wear uniform or behave in a certain way to distinguish him/her
• To investigate how far people would obey an authority figure who ordered them to do harm to another person
• This was a controlled observation, but was not an experiment, because no IV was manipulated
• Participants were 40 men aged between 20 and 50, who came from various occupational backgrounds. They had been recruited through a newspaper advert (volunteer sampling) and were each paid $4
• Milgram's procedure


  1. Participants were told the study was to see how punishment affects learning

  2. They drew lots to see who would be the 'teacher' and who the 'learner'

  3. The 'learner' was told his task – to memorise word pairs – and was wired to an 'electric shock' machine

  4. The teacher was instructed to increase the shock every time the participant gave a wrong answer

  5. All the learner's responses were pre-recorded, and most of the answers were wrong

  6. The learner appeared to suffer distress as the shock increased, including screaming and pounding on the wall

  7. Eventually there was silence
• All participants continued to at least 300V. 26 out of 40 (65%) continued to the maximum shock level. Most participants showed signs of distress