Social Influence

Proximity:

• University- 65%
• Teacher and learner in the same room- 40%
• Teacher forces learners hand on the shock plate- 30%
• Experimenter gave orders by phone- 20.5%

Location:

• He conducted a variation study in a run down office.-47.5%

Uniform:

• Experimenter was taken over by a member of the public- 20%

Bickman (1974): Jacket and tie, Milkman Security guard- people were twice as likely to obey him

Orne and Holland: lack of internal validity.

• It's unclear whether the resuts are due to the operation of obedience r because the participant saw the deception and acted accoridngly.

Aim: To see how minority can influence the majority

Procedure:

• Experimental method
• Groups of 6 people including 2 confederates was asked to view a set of blue coloured slides
• All participants were females
• They were tested if they were colour blind
• Part 1: Consistence as 2 confederates said that the 36 slides were green
• Part 2: Inconsistence as they answered green 24 times and blue 12 times. 

Findings:

• Consistence group- 8.45%
• 32% gave the same answer as minority on at least one trial

Conclusion- Minorities can influence majority only if they have a consistance behaviour style

• They repeated Asch's line study with engineering students in the Uk,
• Only 1 student onformed in a total of 396 trials. Conformist time in America it made sense to conform to establish social norms
• Asch's effect is not consistence across situations.

Hofling:

Aim- carried out a field experiement to investigate if people would obey

Procedure-  involved a naturalistic field experiment involving 22 night nurses. Dr. Smith  phones the nurses at hospital and asks them to check to see if they have the drug astroten. 

Dr. Smith gave the nurses orders to give a patient a dosage of 20mg when the maximum was 10mg. The nurses were watched to see what thery would do. 21/22 nurses obeyed.

Lucas et al (2000)

Asked students to solve a mathemathic problem that were from easy to difficult. There was greater conformity to incorrect answers when they were difficult rather when they were easier onces. People conform in situations where they feel they don't know the answer, which is exactly the outcome predicted by the ISI explanation.

McGhee and Teevan (1967)

NSI isn't effective for eveyone's behaviour. For exam-le, people who are less concerned with being liked are lessaffected by NSi than those who care more about being liked. Such people are described as nAffliliators. They found that students had high need of affliiation and were more likely to conform.

Procedure

He investigated 2000 white middle class men and their unconcious attitude towards racial groups. they developed several scales to investigated this, include the F-scale which is still used to measure the authoritarian personality.

Findings

Authoritians were those who scores high on the F-scale. They were identified as strong people adn who had contemptuous for the weak and respected authority. they had a cognitive style as there was no fuzziness between categories of people, with fixed categories of stereotypes about other groups.

Drawing attention

• Civil rights movement

Consistency

• Number of marches and activities

Deeper processing

• People who had accepted the status quo start thinking about the unjustness

Augmentation principle

• Number of incidents where the individual risk their life
• Freedom rides- beaten up

Snowball effect

• MLK- change from minority to majority

Social cryptomnesia

• When indivuals don't remember how the change has happened eventhough they have memory that the change occured.

Agentic state- A mental state where we feel no responsibility for our own behaviour as we believe that we are acting for an authority figure

Autonomous state- When the indivual takes responsibilty for their own actions and are free and indepedent to do what they want to do.

• The shift from the agentic state to the autonomous state is called the agentic shift.
• This occures when an individual perceives someone with a higher social position.

Binding factors- Factors that the indivual ignores to remain in the agentic state. This could be due to the aspects of a situation and so the indivual misses or minimised the damaging effects.

Legitmacy authority

An explanation of obedience in wich we obey people who we perceive to have higher authority over us.

A limited explanation for Hofling's findings. Agentic state can only account for some situations

Consistency

Minority influence is most effective when the group keeps the same beliefs both over time between all the people that form the minority.. It's effective because it draws attention to the minority's viewpoint.

Commitment

Minority influence is most powerful when the minority show dedication toi their position, for example, making personal desicion sacrifices. Because it shows that the minority isn't acting on self- interests.

Flexibility

Minority influence is more effective by showing flexibility by accepting the poissible compromise.

Artificial tasks

• Asch line study
• Lacks external validity