Social influence

• Barriers to social change

  • People often resist social change, even when they agree with it
  • Didn't want to be associated with stereotypical change groups
  • Saw environmentalists as 'tree huggers'
• Research support – resistance to obedience - Gamson et al found higher levels of resistance in their study than Milgram = they put pp’s in groups and made them get evidence that would help an oil company run a smear campaign = 88% rebelled
• Huge flaws in the methodology – The scale is highly flawed because someone could get a very high score just by ticking the same column of boxes the whole way down = no variety

  Outdated – Attitudes in modern times are completely different
• A limited explanation – Agentic shift doesn’t explain many research findings = doesn’t explain WHY participants didn’t obey
• Lack of internal validity – Orne and Holland believe that participants believed that the study was fake. This is even more likely due to the ‘random’ variations which played out seeming unrealistic (such as a ‘random member of the public’ replacing them)
• Milgram’s research

  May be social identity theory – Maybe the pp identified with the experimenter because they were a scientist in a scientific study. Those who didn’t go to max didn’t identify with the experimenter?

  Ethics – made people believe they hurt someone, and didn’t let them leave
• Asch’s research

  Artificial situation and task – In a lab, demand characteristics would have played a huge role. Also, the ‘groups’ didn’t mirror a genuine scene where conformity may take place in the real-world. This suggests that it cannot be generalised to everyday situations

  Limited application of findings – Only men from the USA. Women would be more likely to conform, and the USA is an individualist culture. Similar studies in China found much higher levels of conformity
• Zimbardos weaknesses

  Role of dispositional influences – Zimbardo has been accused of exaggerating the power of the situation to influence behaviour. For example, only 1/3rd of the guards behaved in a brutal manner. This suggests that Zimbardo’s conclusion may be over-stated

  Ethics!!!!

  BBC 2002 – Recreated the study for TV and found that it was the prisoners who took control = questions reproducibility. However they knew what they were getting themselves in for and that they would be on TV
• Milgram’s Reseach strengths

  Good external validity – the relationship between pp and experimenter mimics real life situations which means results can be generalised to real life

  Supporting replication – French TV did a replication of his study. 80% of pp’s went to the maximum shock of 460V to what they believed was an unconscious man
• Situational variables strengths

  Research support – Bickman had three different confederates dressed in jacket and tie, milkman, or security guard and had them ask people in NYC to pick up litter – twice as likely to obey if they were security rather than suit and tie

  Cross-cultural replications – A strength is that they have been replicated all around the world. Miranda et al found an obedience rate of 90% amongst Spanish students
• Social-psychological factors strengths

  Research support – Blass and Schmitt showed students a video of Milgram’s study and asked them to say who was responsible. They blamed the experimenter rather than the participant, because he was on top of the hierarchy.

  Support from Hofling’s nurse study – When nurses handed responsibility over to their doctors, they were willing to give patients lethal dosages because they believed that the doctors had more authority than them
• Legitimacy of authority strengths

  Cultural differences – A strength of the explanation is that it gives a useful account of cultural differences in obedience

  Many countries differ in how obedient people are to authority

  Kilham and Mann = Australian Milgram study = 16% went all the way

  Mantell = Germany= 85% went all the way
• Dispositional explanations weaknesses

  Correlation, not determination – It is impossible to conclude that authoritarian personality causes obedience just by looking at Milgram’s work looking at obedience and high F scale scorers = chances are there is a third factor involved

  Political bias – The F scale measures tendency towards the extreme right – this is bias because it doesn’t account for obedience to authority across the whole political spectrum
• Resistance to social influence strengths

  Research support – resistance to conformity - Allen and Levine found that conformity decreased when there was a dissenter in an Asch-type study = shows that resistance is not just motivated by following someone else, but it’s the notion of being free from the pressure of a whole group against you
• Minority influence strengths

  Research support for consistency – Moscovici demonstrates that consistent minority views have a greater effect on people than inconsistent minorities. Wood et al did meta-analysis of 100 similar studies and found most consistent were best

  Research also supports internalisation – In a variation of Moscovici’s study, pp’s wrote down the colours = they still agreed with the minority which shows they weren’t just publicly changing their mind