Social influence

• Conformity


  A form of majority influence where the attitudes, beliefs, and behaviours of people in a particular group are adopted in response to real or imagined group pressure
• Types of conformity


  • Compliance
  • Identification
  • Internalisation
• Compliance


  Publicly conforming to the behaviour or views of others in a group to be accepted or avoid disapproval, but privately maintaining one's own views. This is a temporary change in behaviour.
• Identification


  Individuals adjust their behaviour and opinions to those of a group because they identify with that group and want to become part of it. This is a stronger type of conformity than compliance, involving public and private acceptance.
• Internalisation


  A conversion (or change) of private views to match those of the group. The behaviour or belief of the majority is accepted by the individual and becomes part of their own belief system. It is the most permanent form of conformity.
• Normative Social Influence (NSI)

  Desire to be liked - following the crowd. People conform because they desire to be liked, by the other members of the group, and also want to avoid being rejected.
• Informational Social Influence (ISI)

  Desire to be right - accepting the majority's viewpoint. People turn to others who they believe to be correct, in an attempt to gain information about how to think or act, or in ambiguous situations where there is no clear answer.
• Normative Social Influence


  Associated with compliance
• Informational Social Influence

  Leads to internalisation
• Asch's (1951) line experiment found a 37% conformity rate to wrong answers, with 75% of participants conforming to at least one wrong answer
• When Asch asked the participants to write down their answers, conformity rates fell to 12.5%
• Lucas et al (2006) found greater conformity to incorrect answers with more difficult questions, particularly with participants who rated their maths ability as poor
• A limitation of the Informational Social Influence and Normative Social Influence explanations is that they do not account for individual differences
• A limitation of Deutsch and Gerard's 'Two-process' approach is that it is not always possible to distinguish between ISI and NSI
• Conformity is reduced when there is one other dissenting participant in the Asch experiment
• Asch found that students were less conformist than other participants in his experiment
• Perrin and Spencer replicated Asch's original study with engineering students in the UK and also found less conformity
• Asch's situational variables affecting conformity include task difficulty, group size, and unanimity
• Conformity increases when task difficulty increases, as the right answer becomes less obvious and confidence in our own judgement tends to drop
• Conformity rates increase as the size of a majority influence increased, but only to a certain point, where further increases into the group size doesn't lead to further increases in conformity
• Unanimity, where all group members are in agreement, leads to higher levels of conformity
• Zimbardo (1973) - The Stanford Prison Study
• Dehumanisation

  A process where people are degraded by lessening their human qualities
• Deindividuation

  A process where individuals lose a sense of personal identity
• Milgram (1963) - Research into Obedience and the Power of an Authority Figure
• The German population's unquestioning cooperation enabled the Nazis to exterminate the Jewish people and other minority groups
• Laboratory experiment, Yale University, to see how punishment affects learning

  1. Volunteer sample of 40 male participants, aged 20-50, paid $4.50

  2. Participant was always the 'Teacher'

  3. Two confederates - one acted as a 'learner' and one as an 'experimenter'

  4. The 'learner' gave wrong answers and received fake shocks starting at 15 volts and going up in 15volt steps until 450volts

  5. The 'learner' was in a different room, and cried out after each shock

  6. If the participants didn't want to carry on, the 'experimenter' would say 'prods' like 'please continue'
• Obedience

  A form of social influence, in which an individual follows a direct order from a perceived authority figure. There is an implication that the person would not respond in this way without the order.
• Situational variables affecting obedience

  • Proximity
  • Location
  • Uniform
• Proximity: Physical closeness or distance of an authority figure to the person they are giving an order to

  Reduced proximity (experimenter gave orders via telephone in different room) dropped obedience from 65% to 20.5%
• Agentic state vs autonomous state

  More likely to obey in agentic state as responsibility is diffused
• Adolf Eichmann used the agentic state defence of 'just following orders' for his role in the Holocaust
• Legitimacy of authority

  The amount of social power held by the person giving instructions. We are socialised to obey those society has given the right to demand obedience, e.g. teachers, doctors, police
• Uniform

  • Can convey legitimacy of authority
• Experimenter wearing lab coat

  Signalled status and authority, contributed to high obedience (65%)
• Experimenter dressed as security guard

  82% obeyed request, vs 36% when dressed normally
• 84% of participants indicated they were glad to have taken part, 74% felt they had learned something extremely valuable about themselves
• Psychiatric examinations one year later showed no sign of permanent psychological damage
• Uniform


  Can convey a legitimacy of authority
• Evaluation of legitimacy of authority

  • Milgram's original laboratory experiment involved using a confederate who played the role of the Experimenter. The Experimenter wore a white lab coat which signalled status and authority to the real participants. Obedience was high (65%) which suggest that the perceived legitimacy of the Experimenter had an effect on the real participant's obedience levels.
  • Bickman (1974) carried out a field experiment in New York in which he asked passers-by to complete tasks. When the experimenter was dressed as a security guard, 82% of participants obeyed the request to lend money, due to the legitimacy the uniform portrayed. When the experimenter wore normal clothes, only 36% obeyed.