Social Influence
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- Created by: Laura Davey
- Created on: 04-06-13 13:18
Conformity
Internalisation
- publicly changing attitudes and behaviour to fit in with the group
- also agree with it privately
Compliance
- publicly changing attitudes and behaviour to fit in with the group
- disagree with the change privately
- do it to be favoured
Identification
- going along with others because you have accepted their point of view - only because of a desire to be like them
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Conformity to majority influence
AO1 - Asch (1956)
- student volunteers - vision test
- only 1 was a real participant - the rest were confederates
- wanted to see how the real participant would react to the confederates behaviour
- asked to state which like out of 3 was the same length as the standard line
- 123 male undergraduates
- confederates gave the incorrrect answer in 12 of the 18 trials
- on the 12 critical trials, 37% of the responses by participants were wrong
- 1/4 never confromed
- control study - only 1% made mistakes
- interviewed some participants to find out why they confromed, they concluded
- distortion of perception
- distortion of judgement
- distortion of action
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Conformity to majority influence - part II
AO2
- -ve biased sample -doesnt represent greater population
- students/volunteers
- male/american
- -ve individual differences
- a meta analysis was carried out of 145 studies and found that women were generally more compliant than men
- +ve influential - many follow up studies
- -ve cultural differences - individualist vs collectivist
- collectivist less concerned with personal goals there should be more likely to yield to majority
- -ve ethics
- participants unaware of the real purpose of the experiement
- +ve however they were debreifed and told they had the right to withdraw their data
- -ve 'child of its time'
- conducted in an era of McCarthyism - strong anti communist feeling - scared to be different - carried out may give different results
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Conformity to minority influence
AO1 - Moscovici et al 1969
- minority having an effect on majority through consistence in the view
- tested 32 groups of 6 women in each
- 2 confederates in each group
- shown blue slied - filter vaired the colour intensity
- participants asked to verbally describe the colour they saw
- confederates answered 1st + 2nd or 1st + 4th - stating the slide was green
- another part of the experiment confederates were inconsistent - said green 24 times and blue 12
- agreed with minority on 8.42% of the trials
- 32% gave the same answer as the minority at least once
- when they were inconsistent, agreement with minority was only 1.25%
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Conformity to minority influence - part II
AO2
- -ve biased sample - not representative of greater population -all females
- -ve individual differences
- studies have show that women are more likely to conform
- +ve influential
- one study suggests minority influence research has given important insights into how and when social influence works e.g. the importance of consistency
- -ve validity
- real world application suggests that minority influence is very rare
- one study claims that when it comes to a jury making a decision, majority view determines the verdict
- +ve supporting study
- a meta analysis of 97 studies of minority influence found that minorities who were consistent were particularly influential
- majority group more likely to admit being inlfuenced privately rather than publicy - dont want to be seen as deviant
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Why do people conform?
Normative social influence
- based on our desire to be liked
- we confrom so others will approve of us - therefore making us fit in
Informational social influence
- based on our desire to be correct
- we look to others who may be right to give us information about how to behave - particularly in novel situations
Social impact theory
- theory of why we confrom in some situations but not others
- number - more people present = more influence
- strength - more important the people the more influence
- immediacy - the more people present, the less influence one person will have
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Obedience to authority
AO1- Milgram 1963
- interested in the circumstances under which people might be induced to act against their consciences by inflicting harm on others
- 40 male paritcipants - volunteers
- Yale university
- two confederates - the experimenter (authority figure) and an accountant (the learner)
- had to give an increasingly strong electric shock each time the learner got a question wrong
- learner sat in another room - gave mainly wrong answers - fake shocks - silent until 300V
- if the participants asked to stop the experimenter would say 'its absolutely essential you continue' etc
- 65% of participants continued to 450 volts
- all went to 300 - only 5 stopped at that point (12.5%
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Obedience to authority - part II
AO2
- -ve biased sample - not representative of greater populartion - 40 male volunteers
- -ve lacked mundane realism
- simply not a believable situation
- -ve ethics
- ethically wrong
- people may judge themselves after the debrief - place in a stressful situations
- -ve deception
- lack of informed consent
- participants didnt know the true purpose of the experiment
- not clear that participants had the right to withdraw
- -ve cultural differences
- different cultures respond differently to obedience
- individualistic vs collectivist
- +ve generalisability
- study found high levels of obedience in nurses - but in another more realisitc study they found the opposite as 88% refused
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Why do people obey?
Gradual commitment
- orders given gradually move from reasonable to unreasonable
- this makes it hard for the participant to realise when they are behaving in an unreasonable way
- Milgram - participants had already given lower level shocks - became difficult to change their minds + opinions on what they were doing
Buffers
- refers to aspects of situations that protect people from having to confront the results of their actions
- Milgram - teacher and learner were in different rooms - the teacher was protected from having to see the victim - in follow up studies when the learner was in the same room, the buffering effect was reduced as was the tendency to obey the experimenter
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Why do people obey? - part II
Social impact theory
- states that the likelihood that a person will respond to social influence will increase with strength and number (S K I)
- Milgram - experimenter had knowledge and status as he was wearing a lab coat - he had immediacy as the experimenter and participant were physically close - he had strength because he was consistent in what he was asking the participant to do
Agentic shift
- when people operate on two levels
- autonomously/voluntarily (aware of consequences) and agentically ("not responsible" directly)
- Milgram - at any pariticular time a person is in one of two psychological states - autonomous state making decisions on their own ideas/beliefs - and agentic where they give up their own responsibility deferring to those of higher status
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Locus of Control
A persons perceptions of personal control over their own behaviour
- High internal = great personal control
- High external = external influence is greater e.g. luck
- Internal - their behaviour is caused primarily by their own actions and efforts
- External - it is fate and luck that dominate their behaviour
- Research has shown that
- high externals are active seekers of information that is useful to them and so are less likely to rely on the opinion of others
- high internals tend to be more achievement-orientated and consequently more likely to be leaders and entrepeneurs
- high internals are better able to resis coercion of others
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Locus of Control - part II
AO2
- are we becoming more external?
- meta analysis found that young Americans are increasingly external
- locus of control scores had become more external in student + child samples between 1960 and 2002
- why? western countries have seen drmatic social changes e.g. the rise in divorce rates and violent crimes therefore young people see many aspects of their lives as beyond their control
- +ve supporting research
- research suggest sthat internals are more likely to become leaders than follow others
- one study found that group members possessing an internal locus of control were more likely to emerge as leaders in their groups
- individual differences
- one study of 2600 Russian employees found men were more likely to exhibit an internal locus of control than women
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