Key Psychological Studies (Social Influence)

Kelman (1958) suggested that there are three ways people conform ot the opinion of the majority.

1. Compliance: agreeing with the majority opinion in public but privately not changing personal opinions or behaviours.

2. Identification: publicly changing opinions/ behaviours to be a part of a gorup, but don't agree wth everything the group stands for privately.

3. Internalisation: when someone genuinely agrees with the group opinions and the change in their opinion/ behaviour persists in the absence of the group members.

Deutsch & Gerard (1955) developed a two-process theory, which explained that there are two main reason to why people conform.

1. Informational social influence (ISI): when someone conform to gain knnowlegde or they want to be correct in their answer.

2. Normative social influence (NSI): when someone conforms to a majority answer so that they can be accepted or belong to a group.

Lucas et al. (2006) asked students to give answers to mathematical problems ranging in difficulty and found people conformed more to the more difficult questions as they weren't confident in their mathematical ability (support for ISI).

McGhee & Teevan (1967) found that students that wanted to be liked conformed more than nAffliators, who are people are less concerned about being liked and less affected by NSI. The desire to be liked underlies conformity for some people but individual differences affect the way different people respond.

Asch (1951) investigated conformity asking 123 male students to participate in a visual-perception task. They were shown 1 line and 3 comparison lines and asked which lines were the same length in groups of 7-9, with 1 naive participant to 6-8 confederates.

Findings: the naive participant gave the wrong answer 36.8% of the time, 75% conformed at least once and 25% didn't conform to any of the trials.

Due to the participants knowing they were participating in a study, many would of adopted demand characteristics in the artificial situation and task, which cannot be generalised to everyday situations.

Perrin & Spencer (1980) repeated this experiment with engineering students from the UK and found that they conformed less, which showed that the 50's was a conformist time after WW2, so people conformed more to social norms. This shows that Asch's resutls aren't consistent across different situations and time, which shows that conformity isn't a key feature of human behaviour.

1. Group size: the larger the number of confederates presents, the more people conformed up until a point. With 1 other confederate, conformity was 3%; two other confederates, conformity was 13%; three or more confederates, conformity was 32%.

2. Unanimity: a confederate that dosen't conform to the majority and acts as an ally to the naive participant is called a dissenter and their presence reduced conformity to 25%.

3. Task difficulty: the harder the task became, more participants conformed to the majority answer as the lines became harder to distinguish between.

4. Written responses: if the participants wrote their answers down instead of verbal answrs, conformity levels decreased because there is no group pressure present and no way that the participant can comply.

Zimbardo (1971) conducted a lab study to investigate how people conform to social roles. He created a mock prision in the Stanford University basement and 24 male participants, who applied through a newpaper article, were randomly assigned the role of a guard or a prisoner. The prisoners were arrested in their homes and once they got to the prison, they were referred to as numbers. The guards were given uniforms, clubs, handcuffs, and mirrored sunglasses to depersonalize them.

Findings: the guards intially struggled to control the prisoners but by day 2, the prisoners rebelled against their poor treatment, including being woken in the middle of the night and 'the hole', and one prisoner went on a hunger strike. After, the prisoners became subdued, depressed and anxious. The study was stopped after 6 days instead of 14 days because a psychiatrist was concerned about permentant physical and mental damage to the prisoners.

Conclusion: Zimbardo found that the participants easily conformed to ther allocated social roles.

1. Due to the experiment being in an artificial setting, Zimbardo had control over the variables, which increases the internal validity of the study and shows that the conclusions drawn are more reliable. Zimbardo ensured the participants had a backgroud check; he randomly selected their roles to rule out individual differences so the results were purely down to the stress of the situation.
2, Fromm (1973) states that Zimbardo overexaggerated the power of the situation to influence their behaviour because only 1/3 of the guards behaved brutally whereas another third fairly applied the rules and anothe third supported the prisoners by giving them cigarettes and reinstating privileges. This means that their different behaviours show that they distinguished right from wrong despite the situational pressures to conform.
3. The study lacked realism as Zimbardo injected himself in the study as he acted as the lead reseacher and prison superintendant incorrectly in different situations for his favour, which means his findings lack validity.
4. His findings have real-world applications, the Abu Gharib beatings (2003) and the Nazi soldier's actions towards the Jews and whether they should of been equally blamed or if they were conforming to their superiors. This knowledge means that people are trained to act individually and educated in the dangers of behaving they way they think they should.
5. Zimbardo didn't recieve informed consent from his participants as they applied for the study through a newpaper article and caused him to have researcher bias.
6. Reicher & Haslam (2006) partially replicated the experiment and found that the guards failed to conform, which shows that the results lack temporal validity.                                                                                                                                          7. Banuazizi & Mohavedi (1975) argued that the participants were exaggerating their roles as they were based on sterotypes of how they though guards and prisoners are supposed to behave, and their judgements were miany based from films and TV shows.

Milgram (1963) wanted to find an explanation why Nazi soliders followed Hilter's orders. He used 40 male participants, aged between 20-50, and were assigned the role of the 'teacher' whilst the confederate was the 'learner'. Each time the learner got a question worng, the teacher gave them an electric shock, starting from 155V to 450V.

Findings: all went to 300V and 12.5% stopped but 65% continued to 450V.

Ethical issues as the participants were decieved (no informed consent) and their right to wthdraw was comprimised.

Good external validity as the lab environment accurately reflected wider authority relationships in real life.

Controlled lab experiment, therefore the variables were controlled and as the experiement is repeatable, which means it has high internal validity.

Bickman (1974) investigated the power of uniform in a field experiment on the streets of New York. He dressed three male actors as a milkman, a security guard and a pedestrian. They asked 153 pedestrians to either pick up a bag, a dme for a parking meter or to move to the other side of the bus stop.

He found that the guard was obeyed 76% of the time, the milkman was obeyed 47% and the pedestrian was obeyed 30% of the time, which suggest people are most likely to obey when someone is wearing a uniform because it infers a sense of legitimate authority and power.

The small sample size of the study could be critisized as not being large enough to make accurate conclusions for the findings to be generalized to other real-life applications.

The study was a field experiment, which means he couldn't control variable that could of affected the dependant variable, such as being in a rush to get to work.

The sample was predominantly white, so it's difficult to generalise to other races, especially as the experimenters were white.

1. Agentic state: (when an individual carries out the order of an authority figure with little personal responsibility) the participants were told that the experimenter would take full reponsibilty for their actions and when a confederate adminstered the shocks on behalf of the teacher, obedience increased from 65% to 92.5%.                                                                                                            2. Proximity: when the teacher and learner were in the same room, obedience dropped to 40%. In another variation, the teacher had to force the learner's hand onto the shock plate, obedience dropped to 30%. The experimenter gave instructions over the phone and 21% gave th 450V.          3. Location: when a variation was conducted in a run down building and not in a Yale laboratory, obedience dropped to 47.5%; the less credidble locations have lower obedience levels.                  4. Uniform: when the experimenter was replaced by a confederate in ordinary clothes playing another participant, obedience dropped from 65% to 20%.

This shows that for someone to obey an instruction, they need to believe the authority is legitimate, which means when an individual's position of power within a social hierachy makes them more authoritative. 

Adorno et al. (1950) investigated the causes of an obedient personality in a study of 200 middle-class, white Americans by giving them a questionnaire about their unconcious attitudes. The questionnaire was to place the participants on a potential facist scale called the F-scale, which measures if someone has an authoritative personality.

Findings: people with an authoritarian personality were more likely to conform to people of a higher social status because they are extremely respectful to authority figures and submiss to them. They found that authoritarin people have fixed and distinctive sterotypes about other groups and have a strong dislike towrds people who they consdiered to be socially inferior or belong to toher social groups, which is called a psychodynamic explanation.

Milgram & Elms (1966) conducted a study with people who scored highly on the F-scale and found a correlation between obedience and authoritarian personalities but also less-educated people are more likely to display authoritarian personality characteristics. This is a limitation because it dosen't account for other external factors that could affect the answers of the F-scale questionnaire.

Moscovici (1969) conducted a study with a group of 6 people that viewed 36 slides which were blue/green and were asked to state the colour of the slide out loud. The two confederates of the group begun by answering green consistently but in the second part, answered green 24 times and blue 12 times. 

Findings: when the confederates were consistent in their responses, the real participants answered green 8.42% of the time. When they answered inconsistently, the real participants answered green 1.25% of the time as the control group said green 0.25%.

Small sample as only 6 people participated, so the results cannot be easily generalized to bigger, real-life applications.

The artifical task isn't commonly asked in real-world situations, so the study lacked external validity.

The experiement was a controlled lab study, therefore reliable results were collected and the study had high internal validity.

Hofling at el. (1966) conducted a field study on 22 night nurses to see if they'd obey a superior even if several hospital rules were broken. The researcher (Dr. Smith) phoned the nurses and asked the nurses to administer 20mg of the drug when the maximum dosage allowed was 10mg. The nurses were also not allowed to administer drugs from a phone call and the medicine was unauthorized. 

Findings: 21 out of 22 nurses obeyed the doctor's orders when an observer stopped them. Only one nurses questioned the doctor's identity whereas 11 nurses knew the dosage was above the allowed limit and the other 10 didn't notice but trusted the doctor's judgement.

Hofling demonstrated that people are very unwilling to question a supposed authority even when they may have good reason to.

High ecological validity as it was in a real-life environement and the nurses couldn't display any demand characterisitics, which means the results were very accurate.

Unethical as the nurses were decieved and some were left distressed by the study so it lacked protection from harm (an ethical guidline for a psychological study).