SOCIAL INFLUENCE- PAPER 1

conformity: 'yelding to group pressure'. a chnage in a person's behaviour or opinion as a result of a real or imagines pressure from a person group of people.

THREE TYPES OF CONFORMITY KELMAN

• compliance: when someone agrees with view publicly but disagrees in private in order to avoid rejection. (weakest level of conformity). they change their viewes temporaily and is caused by normative social influence
• identification: temporary chnage in behaviour and belief only in the presence of the group (middle level)
• internalisation: making belief  they're own. (strongest form of conformity) caused by informative social influence. Changes the individuals view permentantly.

EXPLANATIONS FOR CONFORMITY

NSI: when you comply becasue you want to fit in and want to be accepted by the group. often occurs when infvidual doesn't want to be embarassed e.g. Ash line study

ISN: when you conforms becasue you want to be right, so they look at other and copy and obey them. e.g. Jesse belly beans counting

ASCH'S LINE STUDY:

Partecipants: 123 male american undergraduate students. in groups of 6 consisting of 1 true partecipants and 5 confederates

Aim: investigate conformity and majority influence

Procedure:

• partecipants and confederates were presented with 4 lines and 3 comparison lines and 1 standard line
• they were asked to state which line was the most similar to the standard line
• he made the partecipants answer last or second to last.
• confederates would give the same incorrect answer for 12/18 trials

Results:

• control group with no confederates showed nearly 100% correct answers given
• in experimental group, 75% of partecipants give incrorrect answers at leats once
• when repeated over many trials the overall average for incorrect answers was 32%
• 25% never conformed

EVALUATION

S: 

• high internal validity: extraneous variables were controlled, and confounding variable lack of knowledge was removed when partecipants did the exeperiment without confederates
• lab experiment: can be easily replicated becase of strict control
• ethics: partecipants were debriefed
• supports NSI: partecipants conformed to fit in with the group

L:

• lacks ecological validity as this study cannot be generalised to real life doesnt reflect complexity of real life conformity
• lacks population validity: gender bias, only american males used and beta bias, findings of males assumed to be generalised to females
• ethics: deception, could have been psychological harm (could've been embarssed), 
• lacks temporal validity: PERIN AND SPENCER argued that study was affected by the time period it was conducted in, as it was an anti-communist period in america where people were more scared to be different and therefore cannot be generalised to all time periods

FACTORS THAT AFFECT CONFORMITY:

• unanimity: (P) more likely to conform when the group is unanimous  (E) when another partecipant was added or a cofnederate that gives a different answer conformity dropped from 32% to 5.5%, if different aswers are given conformity drops from 32% to 9%  (E) the more unanimous the group is the more the partecipant will feel confident in their answer is correct and therefore would end up being in (L)  unanimity establishes a consistent majority view
• group size: (P…