Resistance to Social Influence

Question 1

What is social support?

Answer 1

• resisting conformity = when unanimity was tested in Asch’s (1951) study, the participants felt more able to not conform due to another confederate not conforming and acting as social support which allowed the participant to follow their own conscience
• resisting obedience = in one variation of Milgram’s study the participant witnessed a disobedient confederate which led to a drop in obedience rates to 10% as the confederate acts as a model and social support for the participant to disobey due to the challenged authority

Question 2

What is locus of control?

Answer 2

• proposed by Rotter (1966) it is a sense we all have onto the events that happen our lives split into internal LOCs and external LOCs
• internals = believe the things that happen to them are controlled by themselves e.g doing well in an exam because you studied hard
• externals = believe that the things that happen to them are out of their control e.g. they did well on their exam because they used good textbooks
• the LOC is a continuum and you can sit anywhere on it
• people with high internal LOCs are more able to resist pressure to conform or obey as they know that they are responsible for their own actions and base what they do on their own beliefs

Question 3

What is a strengths of social support?

Answer 3

• strength of real-world research support from Albrecht et al. (2006) who helped 14-19 yo pregnant girls to resist pressure to smoke by giving them a mentor, those with a mentor were significantly more likely to resist smoking - reliable and applicable

Question 4

What is a strength and limitation of locus of control?

Answer 4

• strength of research support Holland who repeated Milgram’s experiment and tested if people were internals pr externals and found that internals showed greater resistance to authority - reliability
• limitation of contradictory research from Twenge et at. who analysed data from American LOC studies and found that over time people became more resistant to obedience but more external - lacking in validity