Social Influence Flashcards
(52 cards)
What is Social Influence?
The process by which an individual’s attitudes, beliefes or behaviours are modified by the actual, imagined or implied presence of others.
What does Social Influence include?
-Conformity (majority influence)
-Obedience
-Minority influence
What is Conformity (majority influence)?
The tendency to change our behaviour/attitudes in response to the influence of others.
What is Obedience?
Where an individual complies with a direct order from a figure wiht perceived authority. (Individual responds in a way that they would not have done without the order).
What are the 3 types of Confromity?
-Compliance
-Indetification
-Internalisation
What is Compliance?
-Conforms publicly with the views/behaviours of others but privately disgarees.
-Confomrity tends to be temporary.
-Most superficial form of conformity.
E.g. You are a Liverpool football supporter, but all your new friends support Manchester United. When asked directly which team you support, you answer Manchester United.
What is identification?
Both public and private acceptance of group’s views as the individual they identifies with the group and feel a sense of group membership.
-May only be temporary - not maintained once left the group.
E.g. Wearing your school unifrom in a certain way, because your group of friends do like tie loosely tied, collar up and top button of shirt undone.
What is Internalisation?
-Conversion, true change of private views to match those of the group (public and private acceptance).
-New attitudes/behaviours become part of the individual’s value system, so not dependent on the presence of the group, therefore it is long term/permanent.
-Deepest level of conformity.
E.g. Becoming vegetarian because influence by your friends who are vegetarian, but truly believe that eating meat is wrong and continue to be vegetarian for the rest of your life.
What is Normative Social Influence?
-Desire to be liked.
-Desire for the approval of others and to be accepted/avoid rejection.
-Occurs in situations with high social pressure.
-(Often results in compliance only).
What is Informational Social Ifluence?
-Desire to be right.
-Look to others to give us information about how to behave/think.
-Particularly occurs in new or ambiguous situations.
-Occurs in situation where there is a high level of uncertainty where there is a high level of task difficulty
-(May result in internalisation and possibily identification as desire to be right would be an individual is unlikely to both publicly and privately agree with the majority opinion/behaviour).
What were the Procedures of Sherif’s Study (1935)?
-Sherif investigated the autokinetic effect.
-This is where in a completely dark room a stationary pinpoint of light appears to move.
-The amount it appears to move depends upon the individual (in reality the light is not moving).
-People were asked initially on their own how much of the loght moved and again in groups.
What were the Findings of Sherif’s Study (1935)?
-Sherif found that people’s perception of the amount the light moved conformed to a group norm when they were asked together.
-However, this study was critised because the task was ambiguous as there was no right answer.
What was the Aim of Asch’s Study (1951)?
To see if individuals would conform to a majority when presented with an unambiguous task (a task with a clear right/wrong answer).
What were the Procedures of Asch’s Study (1951)?
-Asch recruited 123 male students for his participants and asked them to participante in visual perception task.
-To test conformity, one naïve (didnt know the aim) genuine participant was placed in a group of 7-9 confederates (accomplices of the experimenter. They were shown a pair of cards, on one card there was a test (standard) line and on the other card there were three lines differing lengths (comparison) lines.
-The participants’ task was to say aloud which of the three comparison lines matched the standard line. The correct answer always being obvious.
-In order to manipulate group pressure the confederates were instructed to give the same wrong answer unanimously.
-The naïve genuine participant was always last or last but one to answer.
-Only one genuine participant could be tested at a time.
What were the Findings of Asch’s Study (1951)?
-26% of participants never conformed at all, giving the correct answer on all 12 critical trials.
-74% of participants conformed to the incorrect answer at least once.
-Of those that did conform, on average they conformed to the incorrect majority answer on just over a third (37%) of the critical trials compared to an error rate of just 0.7% in the control condition (with no group). Therefore participants answered correctly 99% of the time when there was no group pressure.
-55% of the participants conformed on every critical trial.
What were the Findings from the Debriefing Interviews of Asch’s Study (1951)?
-Most participants reported that they knew they were giving the wrong answer but didn’t want to be in a minority of one and stand out from the rest of the group.
-Some participants reported they did no want to upset the experimenter and wanted to convey a favourable impression.
-A few participants reported they had doubted themselves, thinking their perceptions were inaccurate and doubted their eyes, they therefore believed the group to be right and did not believe they had given the wrong answer.
What were the Conclusions of Asch’s Study (1951)?
-Even when the correct response is obvious, there may be strong group pressure to conform, especially if the group is unanimous.
-Individuals conform for different reasons.
-Normative, to avoid rejection
-Informational, doubt own judgement, surely they can’t all be wrong.
What are the Validity Crticisms of Asch’s Study (1951)?
Internal Validity:
-Demand characteristics
-Possibly investigator effects
External Validity:
-Lack of ecological validity - laboratory/artifical setting-> artificial, trivial, repetitive task -> with strangers -> low mundane realism -> may not be able to generalise findings to situations outside the laboratory.
-Lack of population validity - all males, all students -> can’t necessarily generalise findings to females and non-student populations.
-Lack of temporal validity - 1950s USA (was lots of pressure to be the same as everyone else due to the fear of communism etc) -> would you get the same findings today -> conformist time -> later studies (e.g. Nicholson) failed to show such high levels of conformity.
What are the Ethical Crticisms of Asch’s Study (1951)?
-Deception - mislead about the aim of the study (thought it was a visual perception task) ->Mislead about the ‘other participants’ as they were actually confederates.
-Lack of informed consent - due to deception -> however, were debrieded afterwards.
-Failure to protect participants from harm - stress -> embarrassment.
What did Asch’s Reasearch into Group Size involve?
-Asch manipulated the size of the group of confederates carrying out the conformity trial by using 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 10 and 15 in the group.
-Asch found that conformity increased as the number of confederates rose from 1-3, but after this the group size did not make much difference e.g. 1 confederate meant a conformity rate of 3% but 3 confederates meant a conofmirty rate of 33%.
-In some conditions, a large group of 15 confederates led to lower levels of conofrmity, perhaps because participants may have become increasingly suspicious when faced with a large majority.
What did Other Reasearch into Group Size involve?
-Replications have tended to support Asch’s findings
-Bond’s meta analysis (2005) found conformity to be similar with majority sizes of 3, 4, 5, 6 or 7 (although conformity was better with a majority of 8).
-Latane and Wolf (1981) have suggested that adding more numbers to the majority can increase confomrity but in decreasing amounts, each additional voice in the majority adding a smaller increase to conformity.
-Other research has suggested that group size has different effects depending on the type of task.
-Campbell and Fairey (1989) suggested that tasks relating to personal preference (e.g. liking a film), group size has a linear effect where more people lead to greater levels of conofrmity. However, when the conformity task task has a correct answer the views of a couple of people are enough to have an effect and increasing the size of the majority beyond this has little further effect on conformity.
-Bond (2005) also found that when participants wre able to give their response privately there was a small negative relationship between conformity and group size.
What did Asch’s Reasearch into Unanimity involve?
-Conformity is most likely to occur when the confederates are unanimous in their answers. –Asch(1956) found that when one confederate is instructed to disagree with the majority judgement and give the correct answers on every trial, conformity decreased from 37% of critical trials down to 5.5% (as it made it easier to not conform due to social support).
-Asch concluded that the presence of a dissenter, someone who goes against the group (and therefore the absence of group unanimity) led to a reduction in conformity as the dissenter provides useful information about the correct response and also reduces the need for group social approval.
-However, Asch found that the confederate doesn’t need to share the same judgement as the real participant, finding that this was just as effective as an accurate confederate in reducing conformity. Therefore, just breaking the unanimity of the majority reduces conformity by reducing the need for social approval.
-Asch said that a small non unanimous group is more powerful than just a large group.
What did Asch’s Reasearch into Task Difficulty involve?
-Asch found that if the task is difficult such as when the comparison lines are similar in length to the standard line then conformity increases.
What did Other Reasearch into Task Difficulty involve?
-Lucas et al (2006) gave students easy and hard maths problems and found a greater level of conformity when the problems were hard. This was particulary so if participants doubted their maths abilities. However, if the task is familiar, conformity is less likely as demonstrated in Perrin and Spencer’s study when engineers did not conform as readily on an Asch- type task as the participants di in the original Asch study.
-One difficulty with assessing the effect of task difficulty is that “task difficulty” depends on the skills and abilities of the participants as well as the task itself. For example, a hard maths problem would not be a difficult task for a skilled mathematician.
