Psychology Evaluation Points

Difficulties distinguishing between compliance and internalisation:

• The relationship between compliance and internalisation is complicated by how we define and measure public compliance and private acceptance. E.g. it is assumed that someone who publically agrees yet privately disagrees must be demonstrating compliance, however, it is possible that acceptance has occured in public yet dissipates later when they are in private because they may have forgotten information because they have received new information.
• It is also assumed that a person who agrees with the group in public and in private must be demonstrating internalisation, however, it is possible that the individual may actually have been mereley complying in public, but as a result of self-perception they come to subsequently accept that position as their own.

Research support for normative influence:

• Research has shown the relationship between people's normative beliefs and the likelihoodof them taking up smoking. 
• Linkenbach and perkins found that adolescents exposed to the simple message that the majority of their age peers did not smoke were less likely to take up smoking 
• Nomrative influence has been successfully used to manipulate people to behave more responsibly when it comes to energy conservation. E.g. Schultz et al found that hotel guests that were exposed to the normative message that 75% of guests reused their towels each day reduced their own towel use by 25%
• These studies support the claim that people shape their behaviour out of a desire to fit in with their reference group

Research support for informational influence:

• Studies have demonstrated how exposure to other people's beliefs have an important influence on social stereotypes.
• Wittenbrink and Henley found that participants exposed to negative informations about African Americans later reported more negative beliefs about a black individual. 
• Research has also shown how informational social influence can shape political opinion. Fein et al demonstrated how judgements of candidate performance in US presidential debates could be influenced by knowledge of others' reactions. Participants saw what was supposedly the reaction of their fellow participants on screen during the debate. This produced large shifts in participants' judgements of the candidates' performance.

Normative influence may not be detected:

• Research on conformity has led to the conclusion that normative influence has a powerful effect on the behaviour of the individual. Researchers have started to speculate whether individuals do actually recognise the behaviour of others as a causal factor in thier own behaviour. 
• Nolan et al investigated whether people detected the influence of social norms on their energy conservation behaviour. When asked about what factors had influence their energy conservation, people believed that the behaviour of neighbours had the least impact on their own energy conservation, yet results showed it had the strongest impact.
• This suggests that peope rely on beliefs about what should motivate their behaviour, and so under-detect the impact of normative influence 

Asch's research may be a 'child of its time':

• It may be that Asch's findings are unique because the research took place in a particular period of US history when conformity was high
  
• Perrin and Spencer attempted to repeat Asch's study in the UK in the 1980s using students who were studying science and engineering. In their initial study they obtained only one conforming response out of a total of 396 trials where a majority unanimously gave the same wrong answer. 
• In a subsequent study, they used youths on probation as participants and probation officers as the confederates. This time they found similar levels of conformity to those found by Asch back in the 1950s. This confirmed that conformity is more likely if the perceived costs of not conforming are high, which would have been the case during the McCarthy era in the US.

Problems with determining the effect of group size:

• Bond suggests a limitation of research in conformity is that studies have used only a limited range of majority sizes. Investigators were quick to accept Asch's conclusion that a mojority size of three was a sufficient number for maximal influence and therefore most subsequent studies using the Asch procedure have used three as a majority size.
• Bond points out that no studies other than Asch have used a majority size greater than nine, and in other studies of conformity the range of majority sizes used is much narrower, typically between two and four. 
• This, suggests Bond, means we know very little about the effect of larger majority sizes on conformity levels.

Independent behaviour rather than conformity: 

• Only one-third of the trials where the majority unanimously gave the same wrong answer produced a conforming response. 
• In two-thirds of these trials the participants resolutely stuck to their original judgement despite being faced with an overwhelming majority expressing a totally different view. 
• Asch believed that rather than showing human beings to be overly conformist, his study demonstrated a commendable tendancy for participants to stick to what they believed to b the correct, i.e. to show independent behaviour

Unconvincing Confederates?

• A problem for the confederates in Asch's study is that it would have been difficult for them to act convincingly when giving the wrong answer, something that would pose serious problems for the validity of the study. 
• Mori and Arai overcame the confederate problem by using a technique where participants wore glasses with special polarising filters. Three participants in each group wore identical glasses and a fourth wore a different set with a different filter. This meant that each particpant saw the same stimuli but one participant saw them differently. This had the effect of causing them to judge that a different comparison line matched the standard line.
• For female participants, the results closely matched those of the original Asch study, although not for the male participants. This suggests that the confederates in the original study had acted convincingly.

Conformity to Roles is not Automatic:

• Zimbardo believed that the guards' drift into sadistic behaviour was an automatic consequence of them embracing their role, which in turn suppressed their ability to engage with the fact that what they were doing was wrong.
• However, in the SPE, guard behaviour varied from being fully sadistic to being 'good guards'. These guards did not degrade or harass the prisoners, and even did small favours for them. 
• Haslam and Reicher argue that this shows that the guards chose how to behave, rather than blindly conforming to their social role.

The problem of demand characteristics:

• Banuazizi and Movahedi argued that the behaviour of Zimbardo's participants was not due to their response to a 'compelling prison environment', but rather it was a response to powerful demand characteristics in the experimental situation itself. These refer to the characteristics of the study that let research participants guess what the experiemters want or expect them to behave like. 
• Banuazizi and Movahedi presented some of the details of the SPE experimental procedure to a large sample of students who had never heard of the study. the vast majority of these students correctly guessed that the purpose of the experiment was to show that ordinary people assigned the role of guard or prisoner would act like real prisoners and guards, and they predicted that guards would act in a hostile, domineering way and the prisoners would act in a passive way.

Were these studies ethical?

• Zimbardos study was considered ethical as it followed the guidelines of the Stanford University ethics committee that had approved it. There was, for example, no deception, with all participants being told in advance that many of their usual rights would be suspended.
• However, Zimbardo acknolowdges that perhaps the study should have been stopped earlier as so many of the participants were experiencing emotional distress. He attempted to make amends for this by carrying out debriefing sessions for many years afterwards and concluded that there were no lasting negative effects.
• Reicher and Haslam's study used the same basic set up as Zimbardo, but took greater steps to minimise the potential harm to their participants. Their intention was to create a situation that was harsh and testing, but not harmful.

The SPE and its relevance to Abu Ghraib:

• Zimbardo argues that the same conformity to social role effect that was evident in the SPE was also present in Abu Ghraib, a military prison in Iraq notorious for the torture and abuse of Iraqi prisoners by US soldiers in 2003 and 2004. Zimbardo believed that the guards that commited the abuses were the victims of situational factors that made abuse more likely.
• Zimbardo suggests that situational factors such as lack of training, unrelenting boredom, and no accountability to higher authority were present both in the SPE and Abu Ghraib.
• The, combined with an opportunity to misuse the power associated with the assigned role of 'guard', led to the prisoner abuses in both situations.

Ethical Issues:

• Milgram's study was criticised by other psychologists such as Diana Baumrind for his apparent lack of concern for the well-being of his research participants. For example, Milgram deceived his participants by telling them they were involved in a study on the effects of punishment on learning, rather than telling them the true purpose of the study. This made it impossible for participants to make an informed decision before giving their consent to participant in the study. 
• Part of giving informed consent is allowing participants the right to withdraw if at any point they change their mind about participating. Although Milgram claimed that participants were free to leave at any time, the 'prods' from the experimenter made it more difficult for some participantswho felt they had no choice about continuing 

Internal Validity: a lack of realism

• Orne and Holland claimed that participants in psychological studies have learned to distrust experimenters because they know that the true purpose of the study may be disguised 
• In Milgram's study, despite the fact that the learner cried out in pain, the experimenter remained cool ad distant. This led the participant to suppose that the 'victim' could not really be suffering any harm 
• Perry discovered that many of Milgram's participants had been sceptical at the time about whether the shocks were real. One of Milgram's research assisstants, Taketo Murata, had divided the participants into what he called 'doubters' and 'believers'. He found that it was this latter group who were more likely to disobey the experimenter and give only low intensity shocks

Individual Differences: the influence of gender

• One criticism of Milgram's study is that he underestimated the importance of individual differences in obedience. A commonly held assumption is that women would be more susceptible to social influence than men; therefore we might expect to find gender differences in obedience. 
• Milgram did have one condition in which the participants were female. Although he found that the self-reported tension in females who went to the maximum shock level was significantly higher than it was for males, their rate of obedience was exactly the same as for males in a comparable condition.
• Blass studied nine other replications of Milgram's study, which also had male and female participants. Consistent with Milgram's own findings, eight out of nine found no evidence of any gender differences in obedience.

External Validity: the obedience alibi

• Mandel challenges the relevance of obedience research as an explanation of real-life attrocities. Mandel claims that Milgram's conclusions about the situational determinants of obedience are not borne out by real-life.
• On 13 July 1942, in Jozefow, Poland, the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 received orders to carry out a mass killing of Jews. Their commanding officer, Major Wihelm Trapp, made an order to his men that anyone who didnt feel up to this duty could be assigned other duties. Despite the presence of factors shown by Milgram to increase defiance, only a small minority took up Trapp's offer. The vast majority carried out their orders without protest.

The Agentic State and Real-Life Obedience:

• Milgram claimed that people shift back and forth between the autonomous state and the agentic state. However, this idea of rapidly shifting states fails to explain the very gradual and irreversible transition that Lifton found in his study of German doctors working at Auschwitz. 
• Lifton found that these doctors had changed from ordinary medical professionals, concerned only with the welfare of their patients, into men and women capable of carrying out vile and potentially lethal experiments on the helpless prisoners.
• Staub suggests that rather than agentic shift being responsible for the transition found in many Holocaust perpetrators, it is the experience of carryoing out acts of evil of a long time that changes the way in which individuals think and behave.

Agentic state or just plain rude?

• Although Milgram believed that the idea of agentic state best explained his findings, he didconcede other possibilities. One common belief among social scientists is that he had detected signs of cruelty among his participants, who had used the situation to express their sadistic impulses. This belief was subsequently given substance by the Stanford Prison Experiment, carried out by Zimbardo and his colleagues. Within just a few days, the guards inflicted rapidly escalating cruelty on increasingly submissive prisoners despite the fact there was no obvious authority figure instructing them to do so.
• Whatever the reason for particpants' behaviour, both studies clearly expose unflattering aspects of human nature.

The Legitimate Authority Explanation and Real-Life Obedience:

• Although there are positive consequences of obedience to legitimate authority, it is also important to note that legitimacy can serve as the basis for justifying the harming of others. If people authorise another person to make judgements for them about what is appropriate conduct, they no longer feel that their own moral values are relevant to their conduct.
• As a consequence, when directed by a legitimate authority figure to engage in immoral actions, people are alrmingly willing to do so.
• History is littered with examples of unquestioning obedience to authority no matter how destructive the actions that these orders called for.
• This sort of extreme obedience is fostered in the course of military training and is reinforced by the structure of military authority.

The Agentic State as Loss of Personal Control:

• Fennis and Aarts suggest that the process of agentic shift is not confined to obedience to authority, but may also extend to other forms of social influence. They suggest that the reason for agentic shift is a reduction is an individual's experience of personal control.
• Under such circumstances people may show an increased acceptance of external sources of control to compensate for this. 
• In a series of studies, Fennis and Aarts demonstrated that a reduction in personal control resulted not only in greater obedience to authority, but also in bystander apathy, and greater compliance with behavioural requests.

Research Evidence for the Authoritarianism/Obedience Link:

• Several studies have reported that more authoritarian participants are more obedient in Milgram-type obedience situations. Yet these studies tend to suffer from a good deal of suspicion concerning whether the shocks they were giving were real or fake.
• Dambrun and Vatine overcame this problem by using a 'immersive virtual environment', where an actor taking the role of learner was filmed, recorded and displayed on a computer screen. Participants were informed that the experiment was a simulation and that the shocks and the victim's reactions were not real, but simulated. Despite this, participants still tended to respond as if the situation was real, and there was a clear and significant correlation between participant's RWA scores and the maximum voltage shock administered to the victim. Participants who displayed higher levels of the RWA were the ones who obeyed the most.

The Social Context is More Important:

• Although Milgram accepted that there might be a dispositional basis to obedience and disobedience, he did not believe the evidence for this was particularly strong. 
• Milgram showed that variations in the social context of the study were the primary cause of differences in participants' levels of obedience, not variations in personality. 
• He believed that the specific social situation participants found themselves in caused them to obey or resist regardless of their personalities. 
• Relying on an explanation of obedience based purely on authoritarianism lacks the flexibility to account for these variations.

Differences Between Authoritarian and Obedient Participants:

• Elms and Milgram's research also presented some important differences in the characteristics of the Authoritarian Personality and the characteristics of obedient participants. 
• For example, when Elms and Milgram asked participants about their upbringing, many of the fully obedient partcipants reported having a very good relationships with their parents, rather than having grown up in the overly strict family environment associated with the Authoritarian Personality. 
• It also seems implausible that, given the large number of participants who were fully obedient in Milgram's study, the vast majority would have grown up in such a harsh environment with a punitive father.

Education may Determine Authoritarianism and Obedience:

• Research has generally found that less-educated people are consistently more authoritarian than the well-educated. Milgram also found that participamts with lower levels of education tended to be more obedient than those with higher levels of education. 
• This suggests that instead of authoritarianism causing obedience, lack of education could be responsible for both authoritarianism and obedience. This is clearly a possibility, although even after educational level was statistically controlled for in the Elms and Milgram study, the more obedient subjects were still more authoritarian on the F-scale.