Social Influence

Internalisation - accepting the majority's views as your own. Informational Social Influence, the desire to appear right. 

Compliance - Going along with things even is you disagree with them. Normative Social Influencce, the desire to appear normal/part of the group. 

Identification - Changing your behaviour to suit a specific role in society, e.g a nurse.

Method: 

- Laboratory experiment, repeated measures design. Visual called autokinetic effect where they had to judge how far a spot of light had moved. Phase 1 = individuals made repeated estimates. Phase 2 = Made estimates in groups of 3. Phase 3 = Retested individually. 

Results:

 - Phase 1 = Stable estimates (personal norms), Phase 2 = Estimates became more alike. Phase 3 = Estimates became more like phase 3's. 

Evaluation:

 - Laboratory experimet, replicable, artificial, controlled. Deception used. 

Method:

 - Laboratory experimant, independant groups design. 8 people per group, 7 confederates. 12 critical trials where all confederates gave the same wrong answer. Control group where participants judged in isolation. 

Results: 

 - Control = 0.7% wrong. Critical = 37% wrong. 

Evaluation:

 - Laboratory experimant, lacks ecological validity, deception used. 

1) Group Size - Asch found in a variation of his study that having a smaller group was less influential. 2 confederates = 14% wrong. 3 confederates = 32% wrong.

2) Social Support - Asch used another variation by including a supporting confederate, rate of conformity fell to 5.5%. 

3) Task difficulty - Asch found that by making the test more difficult, the levels of conformity rose because they were less confident. 

Confidence and Expertise - Asch found a common height of confidence in people who did not conform. A researcher repeated Asch's study in engineering students, found their conformity levels were lower. 

Gender - Eagly, argued that men and women had different social roles due to what attributes each gender had. Which explained why women were more likely to conform. 

Method:

- Male students, recruited to act as either a guard or a prisoner in a mock prison and their behaviour was observed. Prisoners 'arrested' and taken to prison where they were given uniforms and numbers. Guards wore uniforms and mirrored sunglasses. 

Results: 

 - Initially prisoners resisted authority, but became passive and obedient, while guards created new ways of punishing them. Experiment abandoned early due to prisoner distress. 

Evaluation:

 - Controlled observation but artificial. Participants became distressed, ehtics. Observer bias, Zimbardo ran the prison and became too involved. The conclusion doesn't explain why only some participants conformed to their roles.

Method:

 - Newspaper ad, research into memory. 40 male participants took park. Paired with a confederate. Participant = teacher. Confederate = learner. Learner stapped to chair, teacher taken to seperate room. Told to teach learner words and memorise them. Each wrong answer lead to shock from 15V-450V. After 300V learner banged against wall and gave no further response. Experimenter insist on continue if hesitation.

Results:

 - 65% went up to 450V, none stopped before 300V. Majority showed visual sighns of stress e.g sweating, shaking or groaning. 

• Internal validity - Possible that participants didn't believe it was real, and so the shocks didn't matter. 
• Demand Characteristics - Just going alog with the experimenters expectations. 
• Ecological validity - Not a common real life event, artificial. 
• Laboratory experiment - Good control of variables and so possible to establish cause and effect.
• Ethics - They were decieved and were unable to give informed consent. They weren't given a right to withdraw. Showed signs of stress and so weren't protected. However, they were debriefed and 84% said they were glad they took part.

• Presence of allies
• Proximity of victim
• Proximity of authority
• Location of experiment
• Legitimacy of authority

• When we feel like we are acting upon the wishes of someone else, we feel less responsible for our actions. 
• Agentic state - feel like we are acting for another.
• Autonomously - thinking for yourself. 
• Agentic shift- becoming more obedient. 
• Supported in Milgram's study when people began action autonomously and then entered the agentic state when given orders and experimenter took responsibilty for it.
• Binding factors = Reluctance to disrupt experiment, pressure of surroundings and insistance of authority figure.

Evaluation: 

 - Experimantal evidence. But theory doesn't explain why people resist the pressure to obey authority and act independantly.

• Authoritarian personality due to over strict parenting as an explenation of obedience. 
• F-scale = Fascism scale on how strongly people express authoritarian traits. 
• Used after WWII to try and find out if they could explain the persecution of minority groups by the Nazis in the 1930/40s.

Evaluation:

• Elms and Milgram found a corralation between people scoring higher on the F-scale and people who were more willing to shock the learner.
• Other factors e.g education can cause authoritarion traits.
• Milgram found that situational factors had a bigger effect on obedience.
• Theory doesn't explain why whole societies become obedient.  

Method:

 - 192 women, groups of 6, 2 were confederates. Asked to judge the colour of 36 blue slides. Consistant condition = 36 green slides. Inconsistant condition = 24 green slides and 12 blue. Control group = 0 confederates.

Results:

 - Control group = green 0.25%, consistent = green 8.4% and inconsistent = green 1.25%.

Evaluation:

 - Lacked ecological validity, all women, control group meant influence occured + support from other studies. 

Majority Influence: 

 - People compare their behaviour with that of the majority and change their behaviour to fit in. And example of NSI and compliance.

Minority Influence: 

 - When the minority is consistent, people want to understand why the minority sees thing differetly. Meaning that people privatly accept their view, but may not change their behaviours at first due to social pressures.

• FLEXIBILITY
• CONSISTENCY
• COMMITMENT

• Minority and majority influence rely on the same factors, social influence occurs when the combined effects of the three factors are significant enough. 
• Factors = Strength, Numbers and Immediacy.
• Lots of findings support this theory.