Social Pshycology 1.1

Question 1

What is conformity

Answer 1

Yielding to group pressure

Question 2

What is compliance

Answer 2

Publicly but not privately going along with the majority influence to gain approval/avoid ridicule. It is weak and temporary

Question 3

What is internalisation

Answer 3

public and private acceptance of majority influence, through adoption of majority group’s belief system. Stronger permanent form of conformity, as it is maintained outside the group’s presence.

Question 4

What is identification

Answer 4

public and private acceptance of majority influence in order to gain group acceptance. Stronger form of conformity, but still temporary, don’t always agree with the group.

Question 5

What does ISI stand for

Answer 5

ISI is informational social influence

Question 6

What is ISI

Answer 6

ISI is a cognitive process because it is to do with what you think. ISI is an explanation of conformity that says we agree with the opinion of the majority as we believe it is correct.

Question 7

What does NSI stand for

Answer 7

NSI is normative social influence

Question 8

What is NSI

Answer 8

NSI is an emotional process rather than a cognitive one. NSI is an explanation of conformity that says we agree with the opinion of the majority as we want to be accepted, gain social approval and be liked.

Question 9

Reasons people conform:

Answer 9

Distortion of perception

Distortion of judgement

Distortion of action

Question 10

Affilators

Answer 10

these are people who have a greater need for ‘affiliation’ (being closely associated). People high in need of affiliation were more likely to conform.

Question 11

Asch (1951, 1955) what did the experiment show

Answer 11

Altogether each participant took part in 18 trials and on 12 critical trials, the confederates gave the wrong answer.
Findings: naïve participant gave the wrong answer 36.8% of the time. Overall, 25% of the participants did not conform on any trials- 75% confirmed at least once

Question 12

Asch (1951, 1955) conclusion

Answer 12

• conformity on an unambiguous task
• Most participants said, when interviewed after that they conformed to avoid rejection (NSI)
  -37% were wrong on the critical trials- they conformed to the majority due to normative social influence

Question 13

What did Asch find out from different trials

Answer 13

in the control trials, participants gave the wrong answer 0.7% of the time. In the critical trials, participants conformed to the majority 37% of the time. 75% conformed at least once.

Question 14

What did Asch do right

Answer 14

This was a laboratory experiment, so there was good control of the variables. This minimises the effects of extraneous variables.
Strict control of the variables also means that you could easily repeat the study to see if you get the same results.

Question 15

How were Asch’s participants influenced

Answer 15

• Due to the social situation that a person is it.
• Sometimes we are influenced by dispositional factors- due to the person’s internal
characteristics
• To investigate the situational factors, Asch repeated his study - Group size
- Unanimity/ social support
- Task difficulty

Question 16

How does group size effect Asch’s results

Answer 16

With two confederates, only 14% of participants conformed. With three confederates, conformity rose to 31.8% (note: does not keep increasing with the size of the majority.)

Question 17

What was wrong with Asch’s results

Answer 17

-because the participants were not in a natural situation, the study lacks ecological validity.
-In terms of ethics, the participants were deceived and might have been embarrassed
-lacks temporal validity as it does not measure conformity now. It is a type of external validity that refers to the ability
to generalise results of a study across time.
-only contain male results (Methodological issues)

Question 18

In 1981 Asch’s data was reanalysed by Eagly and Carli to show sex differences were inconsistent. However, what was argued…

Answer 18

In 1987 it was argued that different social roles explains the difference in conformity:
-women are more concerned with group harmony
-assertiveness and independence are valued male attributes.

Question 19

When Asch made participants write down answer what changed

Answer 19

When Asch repeated the study but asked participants to write down their answers, instead of saying them out loud, conformity rates fell to 12.5%

Question 20

What is Asch’s experiment

Answer 20

Participants: 123 American male undergraduates
Procedures: participants were tested individually with a group of six and eight confederates. The naïve participate was not aware of this.
- Participants were shown two cards at a time. One had a ‘standard white line’ and the other had three ‘comparison lines’. One line was correct, two were significantly disproportional
- Control group: judged the line lengths in isolation.
- One the first few trials all the confederates gave the right answers but then started making errors.

Question 21

Sheriff experiment

Answer 21

The dot that doesn’t move

Question 22

Perrin and Spencer (1980) repeated Asch’s original study

Answer 22

1 out of 396 UK engineering students conformed, possibly due to finding the tasks easier because of their line of study. It shows that Asch’s study lacks temporal validity and people are possibly less conformist today.

Question 23

Eagly and Carli (1981) reanalysed the data from previous studies (Meta-analysis)

Answer 23

• Sex differences were inconsistent
• Clearest difference between men and women- group pressure from an audience Eagly (1987) argued that different social roles explains the differences in conformity

Question 24

Evaluation Research support for ISI

Answer 24

• Lucas et al. (2006) ‘self-efficacy / personal judgement’
- Students were asked to give answers to mathematical problems, that were easy or more
difficult.
-Results indicated that people conform in situation where they feel they don’t know the answer – low self efficacy