Psychology

• Conformity


  • Internalization - changing your beliefs or behavior to fit a wider social group because you've internalized those beliefs or behavioral norms and think genuinely that they are your own
  • Compliance - aligning your behavior to fit the wider social group despite your own private doubts out of a desire to fit in or out of a fear of being rejected
  • Identification - changing your behavior to fit a set of social norms usually associated with a specific role or position within society
• Informational social influence (ISI)


  Conforming and changing your behavior based on information gained from or about the wider social group
• Normative social influence (NSI)


  Conforming or changing your behavior based on apparent and obvious social norms and expected behavior from the wider social group
• Sheriff's 1935 study looked into conformity and informational social influence
• Sheriff's study


  • Used a repeated measures design where the same thing was done over and over
  • Participants were told a single spot of light in a dark room would move (an optical illusion)
  • Participants first tested individually, then in groups, then individually again
  • When in groups, participants converged towards the mean, conforming to the group
  • When tested individually again, participants generally stuck to the group norms that had developed
• Sheriff's study had good control of variables and could establish cause-effect, but was artificial with limited ecological validity and had ethical issues with deception
• Asch's 1951 study looked into normative social influence
• Asch's study


  • Used independent groups design
  • Participants asked to state which of 3 lines matched a standard line
  • Participants placed in groups of 8, but not told 7 were confederates
  • Confederates gave deliberately wrong answers before real participants
  • Real participants gave wrong answers 32% of the time, influenced by the confederates
• Asch's study also had good control but limited ecological validity and ethical issues with deception
• Situational factors influencing conformity


  • Group size - larger groups more influential
  • Social support - having others willing to dissent reduces conformity
  • Task difficulty - harder tasks lead to more conformity
• Dispositional factors influencing conformity

  • Gender - research inconclusive
  • Experience/expertise - more leads to less conformity
• Social role


  A position within society with expected behaviors and social norms
• Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) investigated conformity to social roles
• SPE


  • Volunteers randomly assigned as guards or prisoners
  • Prisoners experienced strict conditions, guards had power
  • Both guards and prisoners conformed to expected social roles, exhibiting extreme behavior
  • Experiment had to be abandoned early due to severe ethical issues
• Orlando's 1973 study also investigated conformity to social roles, with hospital staff volunteers becoming 'patients'
• Milgram's 1963 obedience experiments investigated why people obey authority figures
• Milgram's study


  • Participants told to deliver electric shocks to 'learners' (confederates)
  • Participants delivered shocks up to 450V, despite thinking they were harming innocent people
  • Milgram concluded people will obey legitimate-seeming orders, even against their conscience
• Milgram's study had major ethical issues with deception and participant distress
• Agency theory


  People obey orders because they feel they are acting on behalf of a higher authority, not as autonomous individuals
• Factors keeping people in an agentic state

  • Reluctance to disrupt the experiment
  • Pressure of a grand, trusted setting
  • Pressure from the authority figure
• Authoritarian personality


  Some people have an inability to challenge authority, leading to obedience and aggression towards inferiors
• Factors making people resistant to social influence

  • Social support - having someone willing to dissent with you
  • Internal locus of control - believing you control your own life
• Minority influence


  How a minority can influence a larger majority
• Factors increasing minority influence

  • Consistency - being unchanging in their views
  • Flexibility - being willing to compromise
• Social impact theory outlines 3 factors influencing the extent of minority influence
• Conversion theory


  Members of the majority are converted to the minority view
• Factors that change how likely a minority is to influence a majority

  • Consistency - when a minority is consistent and unchanging it becomes more likely that members of the majority will be swayed or persuaded
  • Flexibility - when a minority is flexible and willing to compromise or alter their approach it becomes much more likely that they will change the mind of at least some of the majority
• Social impact theory


  Outlines three factors which changed the extent of minority influence: strength (a stronger more vocal and more powerful minority is much more likely to influence the majority), numbers (a numerically larger minority is much more influential than a numerically smaller minority), and immediacy (if a minority is close to a majority in terms of physical distance or personal relationships the influence of that minority increases)
• When people in a group agree with the minority

  The minority starts to exert influence, and as more members of the majority agree with the minority, the minority becomes the majority in a snowball effect
• Examples of minorities becoming majorities

  • Civil rights in the U.S. - the idea of racial equality was a minority view until about the 1960s
  • Rights of LGBT people in the UK - for most people before the 1970s the very idea of homosexuality was repulsive and repugnant, a majority view that was gradually changed by the actions of a minority
• Sensory register


  Stores the information taken in by our various senses, can only store an extremely small and limited amount of information for a very small amount of time
• Short-term memory (STM)


  Stores information for a short amount of time, usually acoustically, has limited capacity and duration but larger than the sensory register
• Long-term memory (LTM)


  Stores information for a long period of time, has an infinite capacity and duration, divided into episodic memory (specific events/episodes), semantic memory (facts/knowledge), and procedural memory (abilities/how to do things)
• Sperling experiment

  • Tested and provided evidence for the sensory register, done under highly controlled laboratory conditions with limited ecological validity
• Peterson and Peterson experiment

  • Tested short-term memory duration and capacity, also done under laboratory conditions with limited ecological validity
• Barrick et al. experiment

  • Tested long-term memory, had high ecological validity as it was done in a real-world setting rather than a lab
• Jacobs experiment (1887)

  One of the first pieces of research in psychology, investigated the capacity of short-term memory
• Miller's magic number


  Short-term memory capacity of seven units of information plus or minus two
• Chunking


  Improving short-term memory capacity by grouping information into manageable units
• Coding


  The way in which memory stores information, can be acoustic (sounds) or semantic (meaning)