SOCIAL INFLUENCE

Internalisation: occurs when a person genuinely accepts the groups norms. This results in a private as well as public change of opinions/behaviour. This is likely to be permanent because attitudes have been internalised e.g become part of the way the person thinks. The change in opinions/behaviour persists even in the absence of other group members.

Indentification: occurs when we conform to the opinions/behaviour of a group because there is something about that group we value. We identify with the group, so we want to be part of it. This may mean we publicly change our opinions/behaviour to achieve this goal, even if we don't privately agree with everything the group stands for.

Compliance: occurs when we simply go along with others in public, but privately not changing personal opinions and/or behaviour. Compliance results in only a superficial change. It also means that a particular behaviour or opinion stops as soon as group pressure stops.

Informational Social Influence (ISI), the need to be right: is about who has the better information - you or the rest of the group. We are uncertain about what behaviours of beliefs are right or wrong. For example, you may not know the answer to a question in class but if most of the class agrees on one answer, you accept that answer because you feel they are likely to be right. The reason individuals follow the behaviour of the group is because people want to be right. It is most likely to happen in situations that are new to a person or when it isn't clear what it right.

Normative Social Influence (NSI), the need to be liked: is about norms - what is normal or typical behaviour for a social group. Norms regulate behaviour of groups and individuals so it is not suprising that we pay attention to them. People do not like to appear foolish and preder to gain social approval rather than be rejected. NSI is most likely to occur in situations with strangers where you may feel concerned about rejection.

• Research support for ISI: Lucas et al (2006) asked students to give answers to mathematical problems that were easy or more difficult. There was greater conformity to incorrect answers when they were difficult rather than when they were easier ones.
• Individual differences in NSI: some research shows that NSI does not affect everyone's behaviour in the same way. People who are less concerned about being liked are less affected by NSI than those who care more about being liked.
• ISI and NSI work together: conformity is reduced when there is one other dissenting participant in the Asch experiment. This dissenter may reduce the power of NSI or may reduce the power of NSI. This shows that it isn't always possible to be sure whether NSI or ISI is at work.
• Individual differences in ISI: ISI does not affect everyone's behaviour in the same way.
• Research support for NSI: Asch found that many of his participants went along with a clearly wrong answer just because other people did.

Procedure: tested conformity by showing participants two large white cards at a time. One card had a 'standard line' and on the other card there were three 'comparison lines'. One of the three lines was the same length as the standard and the other two were always clearly wrong. The participant was asked which of the three lines matched the standard. Each participants was tested indiviaully with a group of between six and eight confederates (people who know about the study). All the confederates gave the right answers at first but then started making errors. All the confederates were instructed to give the same wrong answer.

Findings: the participants gave a wrong answer 36.8% of the time. Overall 25% of the participants did not conform on any trials, which means that 75% conformed at least once. When participants were interviewed afterwards most said they conformed to avoid rejection.

Group Size: Asch found that with three confederates, conformity to the wrong answer rose to 31.8%. But the addition of further confederates made little different. This suggests that a small majority is not sufficient for incluence to be exerted but there is no need for a majority more than three.

Unanimity: Asch introduced a confederate who disagreed with the others - sometimes the new confederate gave the correct answer and sometimes he gave the wrong one. The presence of this confederate meant that conformity reduced by a quarter from the level it was when the majority was unanimous. This suggests that the influence of the majority depends to some extent on the group being unanimous.

Task Difficulty: Asch made the line-judging task more difficult by making the stimulus line and the comparison lines more similar in length. He found that conformity increase under these conditions. This suggests that informational social influence plays a greater role when the task becomes harder.

• A child of its time: Perrin and Spencer (1980) repeated Asch's original study with engineering students in the UK. Only one student conformed in a total of 396 trials. It is possible that the 1950s was an especially conformist time in America but society has changed a great deal since then, and people are less conformist today.
• Artificial situation and task: participants know they were in a research study and may simply have gone along with the demands of the situation. The task of identifying lines was relatively trivial and therefore there was no reason not to conform.
• Limited application of findings: only men were tested by Asch. Other research suggests that women might be more conformist, possibly because they are more concerned about social relationships than men. Asch's participants were from the United States, a collectivist culture. Asch's findings may only apply to American men.
• Findings only apply to certain situations: the participants had to answer out loud and were with a group of strangers who they wanted to impress might mean that conformity was higher than usual.
• Ethical issues: the participants were deceived because they thought the other people involved in the procedure were also genuine participants themselves.

Procedure: Zimbardo set up a mock prison in the basement at Stanford University. They selected volunteers who were deemed emotionally stable. The students were then randomly assigned the roles of guards or prisoners. The 'prisoners' were arrested in their homes by the local police and were then delivered to the 'prison'. They were blindfolded, *****-searched, deloused and issued a uniform and number. The social roles of the prisoners and the guards were strictly divided . The prionsers' daily routines were heavily regulated and there were 16 rules they had to follow, which were enforced by the guards who working in shifts. The guards were told they had complete power over the prisoners.

Findings: the guards took up their roles with entusiasm. The behaviour became a threat to the prisoners' psychological and physical health and the study was stopped after six days. The prisoners rebelled against their harsh treatment. The guards harassed the prisoners constantly and conducted frequent headcounts in the middle of the night.

Conclusions: the simulation revealed the power of the situation to influence people's behaviour, guards, prisoners and researchers all conformed to their roles within the prison.

• Control: Zimbardo and his colleagues had some control over variables. Having such control over variables is a strength because it increases the internal validity of the study. 
• Lack of realism: Banuazizi and Mohavedi (1975) argued that the participants were merely play-acting rather than genuinely conforming to a role. Their performances were based on their stereotypes of how prisoners and guards are supposed to behave.
• Role of dispositional influences: Fromm (1973) accused Zimbardo of exaggerating the power of the situation to influence behaviour and minimising the role of personality factors. This suggests that Zimbardo's conclusion may be over-stated.
• Lack of research support: Reicher and Haslam's partial replication of the Stanford prison experiment brought about very different findings to those of Zimbardo and his colleagues.
• Ethical issues: a major ethical issue arose because of Zimbardo's dual roles in the study. Zimbardo acted as the prison superintendent and when a 'prisoner' asked to leave the study, he refused and acted as though they were a prisoner asking to be released from prison.

Obedience is a form of social influence where an individual follows a direct order.

The person issuing the order is usually a figure of authority; who has the power to punish when obedient behaviour is not forthcoming.

Stanley Milgram (1963) sought an answer to the question of why the German population has followed the orders of Hitler and killed over 10 million people during the Holocaust.

Procedure: a confederate was always the learner while the true participant was the teacher. There was also an experimenter (another confederate) dressed in a lab coat. They were told they could leave the study at any time. The learner was strapped in a chair in another room and wired with electrodes. The teacher was required to give the learner an electric shock each time the learner made a mistake on a learning task. The shocks were demonstrated to the teacher and after that, the shocks were not real. The shock level started at 15 and rose through 30 levels to 450 volts. When the teacher got to 300 volts the learner pounded on the wall and then gave no response to the next question. If the teacher felt unsure about continuing, the experimenter used a sequence of four standard prods: "please continue", "the experiment requires that you continue", "it is absolutely essential that you continue", "you have no other choice, you must go on".

Findings: no participants stopped below 300 volts, 12.5% stopped at 300 volts, 65% continued to the highest level of 450 volts. Qualitative data was also collected, such as that the participants showed signs of extreme tension, many of them were seen to sweat, tremble, stutter, bite their lips, groan and dig their fingernails into their hands. All participants were debriefed and assured that their behaviour was entirely normal.

• Low internal validity: Orne and Holland (1968) argued that the participants behaved the way they did because they didn't really believe in the set up - they guessed it wasn't real electric shocks. In which case Milgram was not testing what he intended to test, meaning the study lacked internal validity.
• Good external validity: the central feature of this situation was the relationships between the authority figure and the participant. Milgram argued that the lab environment accurately reflected wider authority relationships in real life. This suggests that the processes of obedience to authority that occured in Milgram's lab study can be generalised to other situations.
• Supporting replication:  Le Jeu de la Mort (The Game of Death) includes a replication of Milgram's study. 80% of the participants delievered the maximum shock of 460 volts to an apparently unconcious man. Their behaviour was almost identical to that of Milgram's participants.
• Social Identity theory: in Milgram's study the participants identified with the experimenter and when obedience levels fell, it was because the participants identified less with the science and more with the victim or with another group.
• Ethical issues: Milgram led participants to believe that the allocation of roles as 'teacher' and 'learner' was random but it was fixed. The most significant deception involved the participants believing the electric shocks were real.

Proximity: in Milgram's original study, the teacher and learner were in adjoining rooms so the teacher could hear the learner but not see him. In the proximity variation, they were in the same room. The obedience dropped from the baseline 65% to 40%. In the touch proximity variation, the obedience rate dropped further to 30%. In a third proximity variation, the experimenter left the room and gave instructions to the teacher by phone. Obedience reduced to 20.5%.

Location: Milgram conducted a variation of the study in a run-down building rather than the university setting where it was originally conducted. In this variation, the experimenter had less authority and obedience fell to 47.5%.

Uniform: in the original study, the experimenter wore a grey lab coat as a symbol of his authority. Milgram carried out a variation where the experimenter was called away and the role of the experimenter was taken over by an ordinary member of the public in everyday clothes rather than a lab coat. The obedience rate dropped to 20%.

• Research support: Bickman (1974) had three confederates dress in three different outfits - jacket and tie, a milkmans outfit and a security guards uniform. The confederates stood in the street and asked passers-by to perform tasks such as picking up litter or giving the confederate a coin for the parking meter. People were twice as likely to obey the person dressed as a security guard than the one dressed in a jacket and tie.
• Lack of internal validity: many of the participants working out that the procedure was faked. It is even more likley that the participants in Milgram's variations realised this because of the extra manipulation. It is unclear whether the results are due to the operation of obedience or because the participants saw through the deception.
• Cross-cultural replications: Miranda et al (1981) found an obedience rate of over 90% with Spanish students. This suggests that Milgram's conclusions about obedience are not limited to only American males, but are valid across cultures and apply to females too.
• Control of variables in variations: Milgram systematically altered one variable at a time to see what effect it would have on the level of obedience.
• The obedience alibi: Milgram's findings from his variations support a situational explanation of obedience.

Milgram's interest in obedience was sparked by the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961 for war crimes. Eichmann claimed he was only obeying orders. This led Milgram to propose that obedience to destructive authority occurs because a person does not take responsibility. Instead they believe they are acting for someone for someone else - they they are an agent (someone who acts for or in place of another). They experience high anxiety but feel powerless to disobey.

Autonomous state: the opposite of being in an agentic state is being in an autonomous state. Autonomy means to be independent or free. A person in an autonomous state is free to behave according to their own principles and feels a sense of responsibility for their own actions. The shift from autonomy to agency is called the agentic shift. Milgram suggested that this occurs when a person perceives someone else as a figure of authority.

Binding factors: aspects of the situation that allow the person to ignore of minimise the damaging effect of their behaviour and reduce the moral strain they are feeling. Milgram proposed strategies that the individual uses, such as shifting the responsibility to the victim or denying the damage they were doing to the victims.

Most societies are structured in a hierachical way. This means that people in certain positions hold authority over the rest of us. The authority they wield is legitimate in the sense that it is agreed by society. Most of us accept that authority figures have to be allowed to exercise social power over others because this allows sociey to funtion smoothly.

One of the consequences of this legitimacy of authority is that some people are granted power to punish others. Most of us accept that the police and courts have the power to punish wrongdooers. So we are willing to give up some of our independence and to hand control of our behaviour over to people we trust to exercise their authority appropriately.

Destructive authority: problems arise when legitimate authority becomes destructive. History has too often shown that charismatic and powerful leaders can use their legitimate powers for destructive purposes, ordering people to behave in ways that can be cruel or dangerous. Destructive authority was shown in Milgram's study when the experimenter used prods to order participants to behave in ways that went against their consciences.

Agentic State

• Research support: Blass and Schmitt (2001) showed a film of Milgram's study to students and asked them to identify who they felt was responsible for the harm to the learner. The students blamed the experimenter rather than the participant.
• A limited explanation: the agentic shift doesn't explain many of the research findings. It does not explain why some of the participants did not obey. This suggests that, at best, agentic shift can only account for some situations of obedience.

Legitimacy of Authority:

• Cultural differences: a strength of legitimacy of authority explanation is that is is a useful account of cultural differences in obedience. Many studies show that countries differ in the degree to which people are traditionally obedient to authority. In some cultures, authority is more likely to be accepted as legitimate and entitled to demand obedience from individuals.

Procedure: Adorno et al (1950) investigated the causes of the obedient personality in a study of more than 2000 middle-class, white Americans and their unconcious attitudes towards other racial groups. They developed several scales to investigate this, inclusing the potential for fascism scale which is still used to measure authoritarian personality.

Findings: people with authoritarian learnings identified with 'strong' people and were generally contemptuous of the 'weak'. They were very concious of their own and others' status, showing excessive respect, deference and servility to those of higher status. Adorno et al. also found that authoritarian people had a cognitive style where there was no fuzziness between categories of people, with fixed and distinctive stereotypes and other groups. There was a strong positive correlation between authoritarianism and prejudice.

Adorno concluded that people with an authoritarian personality have a tendency to be especially obedient to authority. They have an extreme respect for authority and submissiveness to it.

They also show contempt for people they perceive as having inferior social status and have highly conventional attitudes towards sex, race and gender.

They view society as 'going to the dogs' and therefore believe we need strong and powerful leaders to enforce traditional values such as love of country, religion and family.

People with an authoritarian personality are inflexible in their outlook - for them there are no grey areas. Everything is either right or wrong and they are very uncomfortable with uncertainty.

Adorno et al also sought to identify the origin of the authoritarian personality type.

They concluded that it formed in childhood as a result of harsh parenting. Typically, the parenting style identified by Adorno features extremely strict discipline, an expectation of absolute loyalty, impossibility high standards, and severe criticism of perceived failings.

It is also characterised by conditional love - the parents love and affection for their child depends entirely on how he or she behaves.

Adorno argued that these experiences create resentment and hostility in the child, but the child cannot express these feelings direcly against their parents because of a well-founded fear of reprisals.

The fears are displaced onto others who are perveived to be weaker, in a process known as scapegoating. Ths explains a central trait of obedience to higher authority, which is dislike for people considered to be socially inferior or who belong to other social groups.

• Research support: Milgram and Alan Elms (1966) conducted interviews with a small sample of fully obedient participants, who scored highly on the F-scale, believing that there might be a link between obedience and authoritarian personality. This link is merely a correlation between two measured variables.
• Limited explanation: any explanation of obedience in terms of individual personality will find it hard to explain obedient behaviour in the majority of a country's population. Despite the fact that they must have differed in their personalities in all sorts of ways, it seems extremely unlikely that they could all posess and authoritarian personality.
• Political bias: Christie and Jahoda (1954) argued that this is politically biased interpretation of authoritarian personality as it measures the tendency towards an extreme form of right-wing ideology.
• Methodological problems: the authoritarian personality is based on a flawed methodology.
• Correlation, not causation:  Adorno and his colleagues measured an impressive range of variables and found many significant correlations between them. However, no matter how strong a correlation between two variables might be, it does not follow that one causes the other.

Conformity: social support can help people to resist conformity. The pressure to conform can be reduced if there are other people present who are not conforming. In Asch's research, the person not conforming doesn't have to be giving the right answer but simply the fact that someone else is not following the majority appears to enable a person to be free to follow their own conscience.

Obedience: social support can also help people resist to resist obedience. The pressure to obey can be reduced if there is another person who is seen to disobey. In one of Milgram's variations, the rate of obedience dropped from 65% to 10% when the genuine participant was joined by a disobedient confederate. The participant may not follow the disobedient person's behaviour but the point is the other person's disobedience acts as a model for the participant to copy that frees him to act from his own conscience.

• Research support - resistance to conformity: Allen and Levine (1971) found that conformity decreased when there was one dissenter in Asch-type study. More importantly, this occurred even if the dissenter wore thick glasses and said he had difficulty with his vision. This supports the view that resistance is not just motivated by following what someone else says but it enables someone to be free of the pressure from the group.
• Research support - resistance to obedience: Gamson et al (1982) found higher levels of resistance in their study than Milgram. This was probably because the participants in Gamson's study were in groups (they had to produce evidence that would be used to help an oil company run a smaer campaign). In Gamson's study, 29 out of 33 groups of participants (88%) rebelled.

Julian Rotter (1966) first proposed this concept. It is concerned with internal control versus external control. Some people (internals) believe that the things that happen to them are controlled by themselves. Other people (externals) believe that things happen without their control.

Continuum: people differ in the way they explain their successes and failures but it isn't simply being internal or external. There is a continuum with high internal LOC at one end and high external LOC at the other end of the continuum, with low internal and low external between.

Resistance to social influence: people who have an internal LOC are more likely to be able to resist pressures to conform or obey. People with a high internal LOC tend to be more self-confident, more achievement-oriented, have higher intelligence and have less need for social approval. These personality traits lead to greater resistance to social influence.

• Research support: research evidence supports the link between LOC and resistance to obedience. Holland (1967) repeated Milgram's study and measured whether participants were internals or externals. 37% of internals did not continue to the highest shock level whereas only 23% of externals did not continue. Internals showed greater resistance to authority.
• Contradictory research: Twenge et al (2004) analysed data from American locus of control studies over a 40-year period. The data showed that people have become more resistant to obedience but also more external. If resistance were linked to an internal locus of control, we would expect people to have become more internal.

Minority influence refers to situations where one person or a small group of people influences the beliefs and behaviour of other people.

This is distinct from conformity where the majority is doing the influencing. Conformity is sometimes called majority influence.

In both cases the people being influenced may be just one person, a small group or a large group of people.

Minority influence most likely leads to internalisation - both public and private beliefs are changed in the process.

Serge Moscovici first studied this process in his 'blue slide, green slide' study. This study and other research have drawn attantion to the main processes in minority influence.

Moscovivi et al (1969) demonstrated minority influence in a study where a group of six people were asked to view a set of 36 blue-coloured slides that varied in intensity and then state whether the slides were blue or green.

In each group there were two confederates who consistently said the slides were green on two-thirds of the trials. The participants gave the same wrong answer on 8.42% of the trials, 32% gave the same answer as the minority on at least one trial.

A second group of participants were exposed to an inconsistent minority and agreement fell to 1.25%. For a third control group there were no confederates and all participants had to do was identify the colour of each slide. They got this wrong on just 0.25% of the trials.

Over time, the consistency in the minority's views increases the amount of interest from other people.

This consistency might be agreement between people in the minority group (synchronic consistency - they're all saying the same thing) and consistency over time (diachronic consistency - they've been saying the same thing for some time now).

Such consistency makes other people start to rethink their own views.

Sometimes minorities engage in extreme activities to draw attention to their views.

It is important that these extreme activities are at some risk to the minority because this demonstrates commitment to the cause.

Majority group members then pay even more attention. This is called the augmentation principle.

Nemeth (1986) argued that consistency is not the only important factor in minority influence because it can be interpreted negatively.

Being extremely consistent and repeating the same arguments and behaviours again and again can be seen as rigid, unbending, dogmatic and inflexible.

This is off-putting to the majority and unlikely to result in any conversions to the minority position.

Instead, members of the minority need to be prepared to adapt their point of view and accept reasonable and valid counter-arguments.

The key is to strike a balance between consistency and flexibility.

All of the three factors make people think about the topic.

If you hear something which agrees with what you believe it doesn't make you stop and think. If you hear something new, then you might think about it. It is this deeper processing which is important in the process of version to a different, minority viewpoint.

Over time, increasing numbers of people switch from the majority position to the minority position. They have become 'converted'.

The more that this happens, the faster the rate of conversion. This is called the snowball effect. Gradually the minority view has become the majority view and change has occured.

• Research support for consistency: there is research evidence that demonstrates the importance of consistency. Wood et al (1994) carried out a meta-analysis of almost 100 similar studies and found that minorities who were seen as being consistent were most influential.
• Research support for depth of thought: Martin et al (2003) gave participants a message supporting a particular viewpoint and measured their support. He found that people were less willing to change their opinions if they had listened to a minority group rather than if they were shared with a majority group.
• Artificial tasks: the tasks involved are as artifiial as Asch's line judgement task. This means findings of minority influence studies are leacking in external validity and are limited in what they can tell us about how minority influence works in real-life situations.
• Research support for internalisation: private agreement with the minority position was greater. Members of the majority were being convinced by the minority's argument and changing their own views.
• Limited real-world applications: real-life social influence situations are much more complicated than this. There is more involved in the difference between a minority and a majority than just numbers.

Minority influence creates social change, which can be seen by looking at a real-life example. The African-American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s.

• Drawing attention through social proof - civil rights marches of this period drew attention to the situation by providing social proof of the problem.
• Consistency - there were many marches and many people taking part, the civil rights activists displayed consistency of message and intent.
• Deeper processing of the issue - many people who had simply accepted the status quo began to think about the unjustness of it.
• The augmentation principle - there were a number of incidents where individuals risked their lives. Many freedom riders were beaten and there were incidents of mob violence.
• The snowball effect - civil rights activists continued to press for changes that gradually got the attention of the US government.
• Social cryptomnesia - people have a memory that change has occurred but don't remember how it happened.

Asch highlighted the importance of dissent in one of his variations where one confederate gave correct answers throughout the procedure. This broke the power of the majority encouraging others to dissent.

Such dissent has the potential to ultimately lead to social change.

Environmental and health campaigns exploit conformity processes by appealing to normative social influence. They provide information about what other people are doing.

Social change is encouraged by drawing attention to what the majority are actually doing.

Milgram's research clearly demonstrates the importance of disobedient role models.

In the variation where a confederate teacher refuses to give shocks to the learner, the rate of obedience in the genuine participants plummeted.

Zimbardo suggested how obedience can be used to create social change through the process of gradual commitment. Once of a small instruction is obeyed, it becomes much more difficult to resist a bigger one.

People essentially drift into a new kind of behaviour.

• Research support for normative influences: Nolan et al (2008) investigated whether social influence processes led to a reduction in energy consumption in a community. The key messages was that most residents were trying to reduce their energy usage. Nolan found significant decreases in energy usage.
• Minority influence is only indirectly effective: Charlan Nemeth (1986) argues that the effects of minority influence are likely to be mostly indirect and delayed. They are delayed because the effects may not be seen for some time. This is a limitation of using minority influence to explain social change.
• Role of deeper processing: Diane Mackie (1987) presents evidence that it is majority influence that may create deeper processing if you do not share their views. A central element of the process of minority influence has been challeneged and may be incorrect.
• Barriers to social change: Bashir et al (20013) found that their participants were less likely to behave in environmentally friendly ways because they did not want to be associated with stereotypical and minority environmentalists.
• Methodological issues: explanations of how social influence leads to social change draw heavily on the studies - but all these studies can be evaluated in terms of their methodology.