Majority Influence Flashcards
(37 cards)
What is social influence?
Allport: attempt to understand and explain how the thought, feeling and behaviour of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others
Is social influence deliberate or not deliberate?
Other people do make deliberate attempts to try and persuade us - but we are sucesptile to social influence even when others are not necessarily trying to influence others - we do adapt our behaviour to fit in with others, even if they aren’t tryin
Who are we influenced by?
Majority - conformity - exposure to the opinions of a majority or the majority of ones group
Minority - innovation - situation in which either an individual or a group in a numerical minority can influence the majority
Why do people think we live in a ‘post-truth’ world?
Because fake news abounds, facts are opinions, and there are alternative facts - world has changed, facts have changed. People have access to ways of stating their views and hearing the similar views of others - social media: deliberately restricting the information which is there, so only info you want to hear
What is Westmonster?
A website - with right wing views, find articles reinforcing your beliefs, you can access sources to support what you believe, but not always deliberately because sometimes the news automatically shapes the information which is presented to you based on previous searches
What is an echo chamber?
Situation in which information is reinforced by communication inside a defined system - official sources go unquestioned, and different views are censored, disallowed or underrepresented - surrounding yourself with others views
What is the independent?
Some claims being made ‘social media echo chambers gifted Donald Trump the presidency’
What is assimilation and accommodation?
Assimilation - integrating information that we receive into our existing beliefs
Accommodation - changing our beliefs
We find it easier and prefer to assimilate information to our pre-existing beliefs, opinions and changes than to change these beliefs
What is the problem with existing experimental work on majority and minority influence?
It is about how we respond to information that conflicts with our existing beliefs, opinions and attitudes: doesn’t look at the info that doesn’t do this. in particular when individuals experiences conflict with most of those around him or her (the majority) or some that conflict around him or her (minority)
What is the problem with shaping our world to reduce or eliminate sources of disagreement or inhabiting a world where there is little tension to resolve?
Reduced or no pressures to accommodate and change our beliefs - we don’t want to change them
We get less experienced or adopt at dealing with contradictory information so if we then encounter alien beliefs we are more susceptible - even more to minority influence
Do our beliefs become fragile?
How do we know what’s majority and what’s minority opinion - might not be aware what beliefs are
Why do people not want to live lives on their own?
Because they fear criticisms - so their friends and the public are such a huge influence
Who is the main student of social psychology?
Solomon Asch - series of experiments, trying to understand when people are more resistant and less resistant
Who is Sherif?
Asch’s work was stimulated by the work of Sherif on social norm formation and transmission
What is the auto kinetic effect?
Sherif - got loads of people in a room, to make a judgement about stationary light out loud - ambiguous as it didn’t actually move. their judgements all converged, even though it was subjective, still changed their mind - use the norms that were created in the situation even when alone, still changed views
What are social norms?
Belief systems about how or how not to behave, guide behaviours, without the force of laws, that reflect group members- shred expectations about typical activities - these are a key of social media, extent to which experiences on social media change our social norms
What are the types of social norms?
Descriptive - sense of how many people are doing something
Injunctive norms - what you should be doing
What were the Asch experiments?
Series of experiments
Basic experiments
Show a line, ask them to match what line it fits
18 trials, differing number of confederates
Naive ppt last but one to call out
Confederates made errors on 12/18 trials, starting at trial 3
Unanimous (in agreement) majority
What were the basic findings of Asch 1952?
one third of responses were errors, but absolutely no one conformed. 74% made at least one error, yet 56% made three of fewer errors, compared with zero error rate when they did task alone
even on this ask, they conformed, some degree of resistance
Error defined as: not recalling the correct line (not recalling the same line as the confederate). quite often people recalled a different line to the confederate but still was wrong
What did Asch expect?
People not to conform - where conformity = yielding by calling the incorrect line on trials - he was surprised by the extent of yielding
What did he want to look at?
Individual differences in response to an ambiguous stimulus - he wanted to create a situation where people would resist influence then introduce them to the factors that made them conform - but already had conformed
Was group size or group unanimity more important?
Group unanimity (people in fully agreement)
What happened post-asch?
Crutchfield - atuomation: made the study more like our social media worlds, research has moved away from the face-to-face contact that was so vivid in Asch - perhaps virtual reality will encourage researchers to create more Asch like settings
When do people conform?
Group size
Unanimity
Culture
