psychology social influence

• Social influence


  Changing attitudes, beliefs or behaviours due to the presence or actions of others
• Conformity


  The process of giving into group pressure
• Compliance


  Accepting publicly but not privately, group presence required, temporary change in views
• Identification


  Accepting publicly and sometimes privately, views maintained whilst part of a group but not when they leave, permanent acceptance whilst in the group
• Internalisation


  Accepting publicly and privately, group presence not required, permanent change in views
• Normative social influence (NSI)

  Reason for conformity is to gain approval/be accepted/avoid rejection, don't necessarily fully believe
• Informational social influence (ISI)


  Reason for conformity is because you believe others are right/don't want to be wrong
• Jenness (1932) study


  Participants made individual estimates, discussed as a group, then made second private estimates which tended to move towards the group estimate
• Asch's research procedure


  Used a line judgement task, put a naive participant with 7 confederates who gave deliberate wrong answers, wanted to see if real participant would conform
• Asch's study


  • One third of participants conformed to the incorrect majority view, three quarters conformed at least once
• Variations of Asch's study

  • Conformity increases as group size increases up to 3-4, conformity reduced when a non-conformist is introduced, conformity increases when task is more difficult
• Asch's results may have been due to McCarthyism in 1950s America, where many were scared to go against the anti-communist view
• Asch's study used male American undergraduates, so findings cannot be generalised to other groups
• Conformity to social roles

  Involves identification, public and private acceptance of behaviour and attitudes but only in those particular situations
• Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment

  Investigated whether people would conform to roles of guard and prisoner in a role-playing simulation prison, aimed to test whether behaviour is due to dispositional or situational factors
• Findings of Stanford Prison Experiment

  • Both guards and prisoners settled into their social roles, guards became increasingly aggressive, some prisoners had extreme reactions and left early, study stopped after 6 days
• The BBC Prison Study found that prisoners took control and disobeyed guards, due to developing a shared social identity as a cohesive group
• The Stanford Prison Experiment has been criticised for low generalisability, reliability, application, validity, and ethical issues
• Authoritarian personality


  A collection of dispositions/traits that develop from strict parenting, such as being conformist, conventional and dogmatic, leading to a tendency to be especially obedient to authority
• Adorno et al. (1950) study

  Developed the F-scale to measure the potential for fascism, found that authoritarians (who scored high on the F-scale) identified with strong people and were intolerant of the weak