Psychology Year 1 Conformity

Point: Limited Application of findings

Evidence: The study was only conducted on American men.

Explanation: Weakness because there may be different levels of conformity for different cultures. The US is an individualistic culture and the results of conformity studies in collectivist cultures suggest conformity is a lot higher in collectivist cultures.

Link: The shows that conformity levels are sometimes even higher than Asch's research suggested. This is because asch didnt take gender and cultural differences into account.

P: Artificial situation and task

E: Ppts knew they were in a study and demand characteristics could have affected the results.

E: The task was trivial and there was no reason not to conform.

L: So if ppts did what they thought the experimenter wanted the findings would not generalise to everyday situations meaning this could have consequences to how people interacted with each other in society.

P: Good internal validity

E: The assignment of roles was random.

E: This ruled out individual personality differences as an explanation of findings. If guards and prisoners behaved differently and were randomly assigned, their behaviour can only be down to the pressure of the situation.

L: The increased internal validity means we can be much more confident in drawing conclusions about the influence on roles of behaviour.

P: Lack of realism

E: Ppts were play acting their roles according to media derived stereotypes.

E: They bahved how they thought prisoners and guards should behave. This would explain why the prisoners rioted, because they thought thats what real prisoners did.

L: However, Quntitative data shows that 90% of the prisoners conversations were on prison life showing the view that the prison was very real to them. So it seems that situation was very real to ppts, which gives the study internal validity.

P: Ethical issues

E: Due to zimbardos dual roles as warden and researcher lead to no right to withdraw for the prisoners.

E: Prisoners who asked to leave the experiment were rejected by zimbardo acting as a warden because zimbardo had also fallen into character.

L: This meant that prisoner were still on harms way even though they wanted to leave which could have caused long lasting damage. However, long and in depth debrief was done to make sure the ppts were psychologically okay.

P: Ethical Issues

E: Significant deception in making the ppt believe that the electric shocks were real.

E: The deception caused major distress to the ppts who believe they were significantly hurting the 'learner'. This could have caused bad psychological damage to the ppts.

L: This meant an in depth debrief was required and all ppts were assured their behaviour was normal and left 84% reported they were glad to take part.

P: Good external validity

E: The findings do suggest high levels of obedience when influenced by an authority figure.

E: This has real life application to how authority figures such as doctors have high influence over nurses. Hofling et al, 21 out of 22 nurses obeyed to unjut demands by doctors.

L: Even though the study may have been ethically questionable, it provided society with the awareness of how much an authority figure can influence unjust behaviour.

Agentic State: Acting as the agent of another so doesnt accept responsibility.

Autonomous State: Free to act according to conscience.

Agentic Shift: Switching between the two.

Binding Factors: Allows the individual to ignore the damaging effects of their obedient behaviour.

The Authoritarian Personality

Procedure: The F-scale

Findings: These personalities identify with the strong and have fixed cognitive style.

Characteristics: Extreme respect for authority and obedient to it.

Conformity: Reduced by presence of dissenter from the group.

Obedience: Decreases in presence of disobedient peers who act as a model to follow

Both have research evidence to support.

Locus of control:

LOC is what directs events in our lives.

Continuum: High internal at one end...............................................High external at the other.

People with high internal LOC are more able to resist pressures to conform or obey.

Contradictory research: Recently people are more external and more disobedient.

Consistency: Minority needs to be consistent to attract attention.

Commitment: Augmentation principle, personal sacrifices show commitment to the causes and attracts attention.

Flexibility: More convincing if the accpet some counter arguments.

Process of change: Above factors make majority think about the issue.

Snowball effect - minority view gathers momentum until it becomes majority influence.