SP Social Influence Critical Analysis

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  • Created by: Psych951
  • Created on: 04-05-19 11:42

SP Social Influence Critical Analysis

Advantages

  • Understand why groups are able to influence individuals
  • Accounts for the purpose that groups and group influence can serve to individuals
  • Understanding task-specific factors that impact social influence means the effectiveness of interventions can be increased
  • Minority influence provides a mechanism to understand social change
  • Manipulating saliency/nature of group identity can produce positive impacts
  • Theories can inform interventions to increase prosocial behaviour

Disadvantages

  • Non-task specific factors such as personality, identity salience and situation mean that understanding social influence requires considering the interaction between individual, group and context variables, and so may be hard to manipulate for good causes
  • Social influence processes may not apply to online contexts
  • Can negatively impact opportunities and roles that individuals pursue
  • Ethical and moral issues of manipulating people but also others becoming agents to someone else
  • Social influence measured in labs have very low ecological validity due to the many interacting aspects of social world
  • Theories may only be relevant in social context they were formed e.g. Asch's experiment during McCarthyism where conformity was expected

Evaluation

Social influence utilised to change behaviour should be approached with caution due to ethical and moral issues, but also due to the potential negative impacts. However, the theories do provide suggestions of how social influence can be used to increase prosocial behaviour and also help personal motives/self-esteem.

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