Psychology alevel

• 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
• Sherif's 1935 study on conformity and ISI


  1. Participants tested individually first

  2. Participants tested in groups

  3. Participants tested individually again
• Participants converged towards the mean when tested in groups, then generally stuck to these group norms when tested individually again
• This study had good control of variables and could establish cause-effect, but had limited ecological validity and ethical issues
• Asch's 1951 study on conformity and NSI


  1. Participants asked to state which of three lines matched a standard line

  2. Participants placed in groups of 8 with 7 confederates giving deliberately wrong answers

  3. Participants gave wrong answers 32% of the time in groups with confederates, compared to 1% in control group
• This study also had good control of variables and could establish cause-effect, but had limited ecological validity and ethical issues
• Situational factors influencing conformity


  • Group size - larger groups are more influential
  • Social support - having others willing to dissent
  • 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


  1. Mock prison set up with volunteers randomly assigned as guards or prisoners

  2. Participants conformed to expected social roles, exhibiting extreme behavior like violence and aggression

  3. Experiment had to be abandoned early due to severe ethical issues
• Other studies like Orlando's 1973 mock psychiatric ward also found participants conforming to social roles
• Experiments after the Holocaust tried to explain obedience to authority, but found social roles were more flexible than the Stanford Prison Experiment
• Milgram's 1963 obedience experiments


  1. Participants instructed to deliver electric shocks to a "learner" (actually a confederate)

  2. All participants delivered shocks up to at least 300V, most went to 450V

  3. Milgram concluded people will obey legitimate-seeming orders, even against their conscience
• Milgram's study had massive ethical issues, with participants experiencing stress and even nervous breakdowns
• Situational factors influencing obedience in Milgram's study


  • Proximity to victim
  • Presence of allies
  • Proximity of authority
  • Location of experiment
• Agency theory


  People obey orders because they feel they are acting on behalf of a higher authority, not as autonomous individuals
• Other explanations for obedience include legitimacy of authority and authoritarian personality
• Factors making people resistant to social influence


  • Social support
  • Internal locus of control
• Moscovici's 1969 study on minority influence


  1. Minority of 2 confederates gave deliberately wrong answers, many participants also gave wrong answers

  2. Moscovici's conversion theory - members of majority are converted to minority view
• Factors increasing likelihood of minority influence


  • Consistency
  • Flexibility
• Social impact theory also outlined factors influencing 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


  • 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
  • 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
• As more members of the majority start to agree with the minority


  The minority becomes the majority and the old majority becomes the new minority
• 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, this was a very majority view that was gradually changed by the actions of an immediate numerate vocal 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, semantic and procedural memory
• Sperling experiment tested and provided evidence for the sensory register
• Peterson and Peterson experiment tested short-term memory duration and capacity
• Barrick et al. experiment tested long-term memory by asking participants to recall and match photographs of ex-classmates
• Jacob's experiment


  Investigated the ability of participants to recall strings of numbers and letters, found the average capacity of short-term memory was between 5 and 9 individual digits or letters
• Miller's magic number


  Short-term memory capacity of 7 units of information plus or minus 2
• Chunking


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


  The way in which memory stores information, can be acoustic or semantic
• Baddeley's 1966 experiment showed participants struggled to remember semantically similar words stored in long-term memory and acoustically similar words stored in short-term memory