Social influence

• Conformity


  A change in a person's behavior or opinions as a result of real or imagined social pressure
• Types of conformity


  • Internalisation
  • Identification
  • Compliance
• Compliance


  Publicly conforming to the group behaviours/ideas, but privately keeping one's own personal opinions. It results in a temporary change in behaviour.
• Identification


  An individual values membership of a group and so will conform to their behaviour and ideas publicly and privately in order to feel part of said group, but doesn't fully agree so will revert to personal ideas/behaviours if separated from the group for long enough. So this form of conformity is temporary, but longer lasting than compliance.
• Internalisation


  The deepest form of conformity. The individual's personal opinions genuinely change to match those of the group. This is a permanent change in beliefs.
• Informational social influence (ISI)


  Occurs in situations where the correct behaviour is unclear, so individuals look to the majority for guidance how to behave because they want to be correct. ISI often results in internalisation, that is, permanently adopting the views of the majority.
• Normative social influence (NSI)

  Occurs in situations where individuals want to appear to be normal and one of the majority so that they are approved of and not rejected. NSI often results in compliance, or a superficial change in behaviour without change in personal values.
• Asch's study


  1. Placed one real naïve participant in a room with seven confederates (actors), who had agreed their answers in advance

  2. The real participant was deceived and was led to believe that the other seven people were also real participants

  3. The real participant always sat second to last

  4. In turn, each person had to say out loud which line (A, B or C) was most like the target line in length

  5. The correct answer was always obvious. Each participant completed 18 trials and the confederates gave the same incorrect answer on 12 trials, called critical trials.
• On average, the real participants conformed to the incorrect answers on 32% of the critical trials. 74% of the participants conformed on at least one critical trial compared to 0.04% in a control group, and 26% of the participants never conformed.
• Asch interviewed his participants after the experiment to find out why they conformed. Most of the participants said that they knew their answers were incorrect, but they went along with the group in order to fit in, or because they thought they would be ridiculed.
• Asch's study confirms that participants conformed due to normative social influence and the desire to fit in.
• Asch's variation studies


  • Group size
  • Unanimity
  • Task difficulty
• Asch found only 3% conformity with one confederate, 13% with two confederates, and 33% with three confederates, not increasing past 33% as the group became larger.
• If the confederate gives the right answer just before the participant's turn to answer, conformity drops to 5.5%. This rate of conformity stayed the same even if the confederate gave a different wrong answer to the rest of the group.
• Asch made the difference between the line lengths smaller, and found that conformity increased when the task was more difficult.
• Jenness' study


  1. Participants were divided into groups of three and asked to provide a group estimate through discussion

  2. Following the discussion, the participants were provided with another opportunity individually estimate the number of beans, to see if they changed their original answer.
• Jenness found that nearly all participants changed their original answer, when they were provided with another opportunity to estimate the number of beans in the glass bottle.
• These results demonstrate the power of conformity in an ambiguous situation and are likely to be the result of informational social influence. The participants in this experiment changed their answers because they believed the group estimate was more likely to be right than their own individual estimate, showing informational social influence.
• Zimbardo's prison experiment


  1. 21 male students rated as the most physically and mentally stable were selected from 75 volunteers

  2. They were randomly allocated such that 10 were assigned to be guards, and 11 were assigned to be prisoners

  3. The prisoners were given a realistic arrest at their homes by local police, so were fingerprinted, stripped, and deloused

  4. Guards worked in 8 hour shifts in groups of three. They had complete control and were given uniforms, clubs, handcuffs, and mirrored sunglasses to prevent eye contact between prisoner and guards.
• Prisoners and guards quickly began conforming to their social roles. By two days the prisoner revolted against their poor treatment by the guards and by six days the rest of the two week experiment was cancelled early due to fears for prisoner mental health.
• Participants in the experiment conformed to their social roles within the prison, showing the situational power of the prison environment to change behaviour.
• Obedience


  Complying with the demands of an authority figure
• Milgram's study


  1. Milgram's sample consisted of 40 male participants aged 20-50 from a range of occupations and backgrounds

  2. The participants were told they would be participating in a study on the effects of punishment on learning
• The study was unethical as participants were exposed to psychological harm. This harm could not have been predicted at the outset, but the experiment should have been stopped as soon as it was clear that prisoners were distressed (i.e: on day 2) rather than being allowed to carry on.
• Milgram (1963) studied obedience

  • Aim: He wanted to find out if ordinary American citizens would obey an unjust order from an authority figure and inflict pain on another person because they were instructed to
  • Procedure: Milgram's sample consisted of 40 male participants aged 20-50 from a range of occupations and backgrounds. The participants were all volunteers who had responded to an advert in a local paper, which offered $4.50 to take part in an experiment on 'punishment and learning'
  • The participants were all invited to a laboratory at Yale University and upon arrival they met with the experimenter and another participant, Mr Wallace, who were both confederates
  • The experimenter explained that one person would be randomly assigned the role of teacher and the other assigned the role of learner. However, the real participant was always assigned the role of teacher. The experimenter explained that the teacher, the real participant, would read the learner a series of word pairs and then test their recall. The learner, who was positioned in an adjacent room, would indicate his choice using a system of lights. The teacher was instructed to administer an electric shock every time the learner made a mistake and to increase the voltage after each mistake
  • The teacher watched the learner being strapped to the electric chair and was given a sample electric shock to convince them that the procedure was real. The learner wasn't actually strapped to the chair and gave predetermined answers to the test. As the electric shocks increased the learner's screams, which were recorded, became louder and more dramatic. At 180 volts the learner complained of a weak heart. At 300 volts he banged on the wall and demanded to leave and at 315 volts he became silent, to give the illusions that was unconscious, or even dead
  • The experiment continued until the teacher refused to continue, or 450 volts was reached. If the teacher tried to stop the experiment, the experimenter would respond with a series of prods, for example: 'The experiment requires that you continue.' Following the experiment the participants were debriefed
  • Findings: Milgram found that all of the real participants went to at least 300 volts and 65% continued until the full 450 volts. Only 12.5% stopped at 300v
  • Conclusion: He concluded that the Germans weren't a different kind of people, and that under the right circumstances ordinary people were just as likely to obey unjust orders
• Milgram's variation studies


  • Variation 1: Proximity- proximity affects the participant's awareness of how the shocks are affecting the learner. Proximity was manipulated via physical location and distance. When the learner and the teacher were in the same room obedience dropped to 40%. When the teacher had to place the learner's hand on the "shock plate" obedience dropped to 30%
  • Variation 2: Location- Legitimate authority influences how likely someone is to obey. When the site of the research was moved from Yale University to an office block in a run-down area obedience dropped to 47.6%
  • Variation 3: Uniform- The use of appropriate clothing also demonstrates the legitimacy of the authority. In the variation where the experimenter is called away due to an 'urgent phone call' and the role of experimenter is given to another confederate in normal clothing obedience dropped to 20%
• Agentic state


  The idea that the individual believes that they don't have responsibility for their behaviour as they are acting as on behalf (as an agent) of an authority figure. The Agentic state allows individuals to commit acts that they morally oppose. They will often feel discomfort as a result of their actions but feel that they are unable to resist the demands of the person in authority.
• Autonomous state


  Where individual's actions are free from control, and so they feel that they have responsibility for their actions and behave according to their moral values.
• Legitimacy of authority


  The idea that individuals accept that other individuals who are higher up the social hierarchy should be obeyed, that there is a sense of duty in obeying them. Legitimacy of authority is learnt in childhood through socialisation processes such as the relationship between parent and child, teacher and student ..etc. This idea extends to suggest that some people have the right to punish/harm others such as the police force and in the criminal justice system.
• Authoritarian Personality


  • Theodor Adorno wanted to understand anti-semitism in WW2. Unlike Milgram who argued that we are all capable of extreme obedience, Adorno argued that high levels of obedience resulted from a psychological disorder linked to aspects of personality.
  • In the 1950s Adorno studied personality with questionnaires. Questions were designed to show unconscious feelings towards minority groups. After studying over 2000 mainly middle class white Americans, he developed the F scale (F for fascism).
  • One of the nine factors measured was authoritarian aggression. That is the tendency to be on the lookout for, and to condemn, reject, and punish people who violate conventional rules. This trait was tested by questions such as "Most of our social problems would be solved if we could somehow get rid of the immoral, crooked, and feeble-minded people". People then had to choose on a Likert scale how much they agreed with the statement.
  • People who scored highly on the F scale showed great respect for people with high social status. They had fixed stereotyped for other groups (usually negative) and identified with "strong" people and disliked "weak" people. They were inflexible with strong, clear ideas of right and wrong with no middle ground.
  • Adorno argued that these people had their personalities shaped very early in life by strict, authoritarian parenting and harsh physical punishment. He linked these ideas to Freud's work. Adorno suggested that this anger and resentment that they felt towards their parents was the displaced onto other, mainly minority groups.
• Adorno suggested that the anger and resentment that people felt towards their parents was displaced onto other, mainly minority groups
• Milgram and Elms (1966) found that those who had shocked to the full 450v scored higher on the F scale than those who had refused to continue


  This shows that Milgram's research supports Adorno's ideas
• Correlation is not causation. It may not be that people with authoritarian personalities are more likely to follow orders. It could be that people on lower incomes are both more likely to follow orders out of desperation to please and thus also score more highly on the F scale
• Middendorp and Meleon (1990) found that less-educated people are more likely than well-educated people to display authoritarian personality characteristics
• If these claims are correct, then it is possible to conclude that it is not authoritarian personality characteristics alone that lead to obedience, but also levels of education, which therefore undermines the authoritarian personality explanation for obedience as other factors may also play an important role
• Altemeyer's Right Wing Authoritarian scale


  A new rating scale to measure Authoritarian personality that fixed many of the problems of the Adorno F scale
• Altemeyer's Right Wing Authoritarian scale showed a consistent correlation between high scores and measures of prejudice towards minority groups
• Authoritarian personality can be seen as a left wing theory politically, as it identifies many individuals with a conservative political viewpoint as having a psychological disorder
• The original F scale has all of its questions written in one direction, meaning that agreeing with all questions will label someone as authoritarian. This is known as response bias
• Some factors measured by the F scale don't seem to be linked to fascism, such as "an exaggerated concern for sexual goings-on"