Download AS Psychology Key Studies Social Influence Memory

AS Psychology
Key Studies
Social Influence
Memory
Social Influence
Social Influence is the
process by which our
thoughts, feelings and
behaviours are influenced by
other people.
Conformity
Jenness (1932) was the first psychologist to study conformity. His
experiment was an ambiguous situation involving a glass bottle filled
with beans. He asked participants individually to estimate how many
beans the bottle contained. Jenness then put the group in a room with
the bottle, and asked them to provide a group estimate through
discussion.
Participants were then asked to estimate the number on their own again
to find whether their initial estimates had altered based on the influence
of the majority. Jenness then interviewed the participants individually
again, and asked if they would like to change their original estimates, or
stay with the group's estimate. Almost all changed their individual
guesses to be closer to the group estimate.
Different Types of Conformity
Not all conformity is the same. People conform in different ways and for a
variety of reasons, depending on the situation they are in.
Kelman identified 3 types –:
• Compliance
• Identification
• Internalisation
Asch’s standard line test in which he identified Majority Influence:
Definition of majority influence:
Asch’s Standard Line Test (1951)
Asch had Ps carry out a line judgement task in which they had to indicate which of three
comparison lines was closest to a standard line shown on two lines (this idea is known as
the ‘Asch Paradigm’).
123 male student Ps were divided into groups of 7 to 9 seated around a table. In
actuality, only one of them was a P (he was naive to this), the rest were confederates.
The confederates would give unanimous wrong answers on 12 of the 18 trials for each
experiment. Answers were always unambiguous so it was clear.
Overall conformity rate was 37%, and 5% of participants conformed on every trial and
25% never conformed. When asked why, Ps said:
some felt they were wrong when they heard a different answer from the group,
others said they knew the others were wrong but they did not want to stand out
some Ps grew increasingly nervous and self-conscious.
Asch concluded that a strong, large group can exert intense pressure to conform,
especially if they are unanimous (all agree with each other)/
Conforming to the views or behaviours of others may be a consequence of different
psychological motivations, such as:
The need to be liked
The desire to be right.
Results of the Asch study are primarily the result of the very human need to be accepted
by others, therefore can be explained in terms of COMPLIANCE – a change in public
behaviour only.
SHERIF (1935)
The auto kinetic effect: In this experiment, a single point of light in a dark room
seems to move. In the experiment, the subjects are unable to keep their eyes
perfectly still and, in the dark, there is no point of reference.
Sherif conducted two versions of this experiment:
1. Individuals were asked to estimate how far they thought the light moved, then
tested them together in a group. Estimates in the group converged as they
established a ‘group norm’. This was close to the average of estimates they gave
individually.
2. A group was asked to give estimates of how far they thought the light moved
then they were asked to give individual estimates, these were very close to the
group estimate.
Sherif claimed that he had shown conformity. The individuals were experiencing
informational social influence
Explanations of Conformity
The Dual-Process Dependency Model
People conform due to two reasons (‘dual-process’)
Normative Social Influence (The desire to be liked)
We conform because we prefer to be accepted by the group rather than stand out
(desire to be liked). This may be for a variety of reasons – it is advantageous for us
to belong to the group, perhaps, or that they are dangerous. This is surface level
conformity and so is purely COMPLIANCE.
Informational Social Influence (The desire to be right)
We may conform if we are unsure of what to do or how to behave in an unfamiliar
or ambiguous situation. We may look at other people for clues at how to act and
copy them as they may have more knowledge than us – we conform because we
want to be right. This is conforming in BEHAVIOUR and ATTITUDE, and so is
INTERNALISATION.
Factors Affecting Conformity
Size of the Majority:
In one set of variations, 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.
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Asch found that conformity was very low when there was one confederate and one
real participant – 3% of the real participants changed their view to that of the
confederate
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Two confederates against one participant produced a conformity rate of 13%
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Group increased to include three participants and one real participant, conformity
climbed to 33%. It did not increase much beyond this, regardless of group size.
•
In some conditions, a large group of 15 confederates led to slightly lower levels of
conformity – could be due to the real participant working out the aim of the study.
Unanimity (complete agreement from a group of people about an answer
or viewpoint)
Asch investigated the importance of unanimity by positioning a confederate just before
the real participant around the table and instructing them to give the correct answer on
the critical trials. He found that conformity dropped drastically to 5.5%
Asch identified two explanations for this:
1.
The dissenter (somebody who disagrees) supports the participant, increasing the
participant’s confidence that they are correct
2.
The dissenter breaks the united front of the rest of the group
Task Difficulty
Asch made the difference in lengths much smaller and found an increase in conformity
when the task was more difficult.
Rosander (2012)
Investigated conformity in around 1000 members of various Internet communities (e.g.
Facebook, Twitter) Ps were asked questions about general knowledge and logic. Half
the Ps were provided with incorrect studies by confederates. The results showed that
conformity to incorrect answers increased as the tasks got harder.
Allan, Midjord, Martin and Gabbert (2011)
Allan et al. (2011) investigated conformity using a memory task. Ps were informed
that they would be working in pairs with another virtual participant. They were
instructed to memorise pictures of three household scenes: one picture was
shown for half a minute, one for a full minute, and the third picture for two
minutes.
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Half the Ps were told that their virtual partner would spend less time than
them studying each picture
o Half the Ps were told that their virtual partner would spend more time
viewing the pictures.
o
Ps were then provided with descriptions of the pictures from their ‘virtual
partner’ containing true or false elements. Conformity to the partner’s
response was most likely to happen when the picture had been viewed for 30
seconds, but only in the group who believed their virtual partner had studied
the picture for longer.
Allan et al.’s experiment shows how we adjust out behaviour based on the
likelihood that we or other people are likely to make the correct judgement.
Conformity to Social Roles
Social roles such as doctor, teacher
or prison officer are associated with
patterns of expected behaviours
which people may adopt.
Zimbardo (1971)
The Stanford Prison Experiment
Zimbardo wanted to investigate explanations for brutal treatment against
prisoners by the guards in some American prisons. He was interested in whether
it was the personality of the guard or the role they were in that caused them to
treat prisoners badly.
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The study is usually described as an experiment
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IV: The conditions the participants were randomly assigned:
prisoner or guard
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DV: The resulting behavior
Participants were obtained by advertising in a newspaper.
Ps responded to the following ad:
“Male college students needed for psychological study of prison life. $15
per day for 1-2 weeks”
75 people responded
They completed a questionnaire:
– Family background
– Physical & mental health
– Any involvement in crime
– Prior experiences & attitudinal tendencies in respect to psychopathology
24 men judged to be the most physically & mentally stable, the most mature, & the least
involved in antisocial behaviors were chosen to participate
– White
– Middle class
– Male
– Healthy
•
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Participants were randomly assigned to the role of ‘prisoner’ or ‘guard’
Those assigned prisoner were informed by telephone to be available at their
homes on a particular Sunday when the experiment would begin.
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On the Sunday, police cars arrived and the ‘prisoners’ were arrested, Once at the ‘prison’ they
were fingerprinted & blindfolded. Then they were searched, stripped naked and deloused.
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Guards we given a uniform - Khaki shirts and trousers, batons, reflective sunglasses
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On the second day the prisoners organized a mass revolt & riot, as a protest about the
conditions.
Guards worked extra hours & developed a plan to stop the riot, using fire-extinguishers.
•
The guards began to humiliate & punish the prisoners
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Many prisoners began to show signs of mental & emotional distress.
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The guards became more aggressive.
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Every guard at some point behaved in an abusive, authoritarian way.
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Many seemed to really enjoy the new found power & control that went with the
uniform.
Some of them volunteered to work extra shifts
They continued to behave in an authoritarian way even when they believed the cameras
were not on.
•
All prisoners’ rights were redefined as privileges
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They punished the prisoners with little or no justification
•
They verbally insulted the prisoners
•
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After this, prisoners began to react passively.
They began to feel helpless and no longer in control of their lives.
Experiment stopped after just 6 days instead of the planned 14 days because of the
pathological reactions of the participants.
Obedience
Following an order to carry out an
action. Orders are usually given by
people with power or authority.
The difference between conformity and obedience is that the source of the social
influence is different. Conformity is likely to be peer pressure whereas with obedience
someone is likely to be giving you an order – conformity involves no authority figure and is
often peer pressure.
Milgram’s Study in to obedience (1963)
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Milgram aimed to investigate whether people would obey so far as to give fatal
electric shocks to an innocent person.
Milgram advertised for male volunteers by placing an advert in a local paper, which
offered $4.50 as payment for taking part in a study of ‘memory and learning’.
40 men from a range of backgrounds were selected and individual appointments
were made to attend the laboratory at Yale University, a prestigious institution.
When they arrived they were greeted by an ‘experimenter’, a teacher in a white coat
and introduced to a middle-aged man called ‘Mr Wallace.’ Ps were led to believe that
Mr Wallace was a fellow participant.
Ps (and Mr Wallace) were told they were going to be a teacher or a learner but in fact
the real participant would always be the teacher as the learner was always a
confederate (Mr Wallace) whom the P believed to be a fellow P.
Teachers/Participants were told to ask learners questions and if they were wrong,
they were to shock them, increasing the shocks in steps of 15V until they reached
450v (fatal).
The shocks were not real and the screams the teachers heard had been previously
recorded. If Ps did not want to continue shocking, they were urged to continue by the
experimenter who used phrases such as ‘please continue, please go on, the
experiment requires that you continue, you have no other choice, you must go on’.
It was predicted that only 1% of people would go to the full ‘450 Volts’ where in
reality it was 65% of people did.
In order to further explore the factors that influence obedience,
Milgram replicated his experiment, carrying out 18 studies in total
with over 1000 Ps…
What Milgram changed:
Effect on obedience
Proximity
Removed the experimenter from the room
and instructed to give Ps instructions to
shock over the phone
Many more Ps resisted the authority of the
experimenter, with only 20% going to the
full 450V
Brought the learner closer to the teacher,
placing him in the same room where he
could be seen and heard by the teacher
Obedience levels dropped
Teacher and learner in the same room. In
order for the learner to receive shocks he
had to place his hand on to a metal shock
plate. When he refused to do this the
teacher was instructed to force his hand
down on to the plate.
30% of Ps still continued to 450V
Location
Moved experiment to seedy office above a
shop. Calling himself ‘Research Associates
Ltd’
Significant drop in obedience – 48% of Ps
shocked up to 450V
How uniform can affect levels of obedience
Bickman (1974) carried out a field study where an experimenter
approached passers-by on a city street and asked them to carry out small,
inconvenient tasks. The experimenter was dressed either in a jacket and tie
or a guard’s uniform. Bickman found that Ps were twice as likely to obey
the orders when the experimenter was dressed in a uniform.
Bushman (1988) Used Bickman’s method of studying obedience, this
time using a female confederate dressed in one of two ways – uniform or
smart clothes. The confederate ordered passers-by to give a small amount
of change to a motorist who was searching for money at a parking meter.
Bushman found that 70% complied when she was wearing uniform,
compared with 58% when dressed in smart clothing.
Obedience to social roles
Hofling et al (1966) conducted a study of obedience in a natural setting.
Their participants were 22 nurses who were unaware that a study was taking
place. The nurses received a phone call whilst they were working from a ‘Dr
Smith’, who instructed them to give 20mg of Astrofen (a drug) to a patient on
the ward. This was twice the maximum dose stated on the bottle, and could
have been very harmful to the patient. However, 21 out of the 22 nurses
attempted to give the medication.
Dispositional explanations
for obedience
Disposition: a person's inherent
qualities of attitude and character
Authority: the power or right to
give orders, make decisions, and
enforce obedience:
The Authoritarian Personality: A
person who has extreme respect for
authority and who is very obedient
to those who have power over
them. They may be hostile to those
of lower rank.
Adorno: The Authoritarian Personality
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Theodore Adorno studied over 2000
American students from mainly white middle-class backgrounds. He
interviewed them about their political views and early childhood
experiences.
He also used projective tests – neutral stimuli such as pictures that could be
used to gain access to people’s thoughts, to assess whether or not they were
racially prejudiced.
Adorno found that people who had been brought up by strict parents who
used harsh, physical punishments when they were children often grew up to
be very obedient. Under these conditions, children quickly learn to obey and
develop a strong respect for authority.
He theorised that children that were harshly punished by their parents would
experience hostile feelings towards their parents. This feeling of hostility
would then be displaced on to members of different ethnic groups.
Adorno developed a number of scales to measure aspects of behaviour and
attitudes, including ethnocentrism (preference for one’s own racial group),
anti-Semitism (prejudice against Jewish people) and the potential for fascism
(a governmental system led by a dictator having complete power and using
force to suppressing opposition and criticism) – measurement of potential for
fascism became known as ‘The F Scale’. The F Scale measures the
authoritarian personality.
Ps that completed the F Scale had to decide which statements they agreed
with from a list. For example:
‘Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children
should learn
People can be divided into two distinct classes: the strong and the weak
Explanations of resistance to
social influence
Research studies carried out by Asch,
Zimbardo, Hofling and Milgram have
shown how many people conform or
obey when put under pressure. However,
in each of these studies, some individuals
resisted the pressure put on them and
retained their independence.
Resisting Conformity
The role of allies:
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Asch showed how the introduction of another person who went against the majority
caused conformity rates to drop significantly.
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A fellow dissenter provides the individual with an assessment of reality, make them
more confident in their own decision.
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Conformity levels dropped even when the dissenter gave the wrong answer. This
suggests that it is breaking the group’s consensus that is important in increasing
resistance.
Rotter scale – internal and external locus of control
Julia Rotter (1966) proposed the concept of locus of control. It is a concept
concerned with internal control versus external control. Some people (internals)
believe that the things that happen to them are largely controlled by
themselves. Other people (externals) have a tendency to believe that things
happen without their own control.
Continuum
People differ in the way they explain their successes and failures but it isn’t
simply a matter of being internal or external. There is a continuum with high
internal LOC at one end and high external LOC at the other end.
Resistance to social influence
People who have an internal LOC are more likely to be able to resist pressures to
conform or obey. This is because they take personal responsibility for their own
actions and experiences, therefore they are more likely to base their decisions
on their own judgement and ignore the influence of others’ opinions/actions.
Another explanation for the link with greater resistance is that people with a
high internal LOC tend to be more self-confident, more achievement-orientated
and have less need for social approval. These personality traits lead to greater
resistance to social influence.
Evidence for the LOC as explanation for resistance to social influence
Elms and Milgram (1974)
Investigated the background of Ps that were classed as disobedient in the electric
shock study. They found that disobedient Ps had a high internal LOC and also scored
highly on a social responsibility scale.
Oliner and Oliner (1988)
Interviewed two groups of non-Jewish people who had lived through the Holocaust in
Nazi Germany. They compared 406 people who had protected and rescued Jewish
people from the Nazis with 126 people who had not done this. They found that the
‘rescuers’ had higher levels of internal LOC and also scored higher on measures of
social responsibility.
From these studies, it appears that LOC and
social responsibility are both important factors in
an individual’s ability to disobey orders or to defy
social norms.
Minority Influence
A form of social influence in which a minority of
people (sometimes just one person) persuade
others to adopt their beliefs, attitudes or
behaviours. It leads to internalisation or
conversion, in which private attitudes are
changed as well as public behaviours.
Moscovici et al (1969)
Demonstrated minority influence in a study where a group of 6 people was asked
to view a set of 36-blue coloured slides that varied in intensity and then state
whether the slides were blue or green. In each group there were 2 confederates
who consistently said the slides were green on two-thirds of the trials.
The Ps gave the same wrong answer on 8.42% of the trials, 32% gave the same
answer as the minority on at least one trial.
A second group of Ps was exposed to an inconsistent minority and agreement fell
to 1.25%.
For a third control group there were no confederates and all Ps had to do was
identify the colour of each slide. They got the colour of the slide wrong on just
0.25% of the trials.
Moscovici’s work identified a number of elements of behavioural style that make
minorities persuasive or influential, including consistency, commitment and
flexibility. The most important factor for minority influence appears to be
consistency.
Hogg and Vaughn (2002) state that a consistent minority disrupts the
established norm, producing doubt and uncertainty in the minds of the
majority.
Consistency demonstrates commitment to an alternative viewpoint.
Another important feature of minority influence is flexibility. A minority group
that appears rigid and refuses to accept views of others is seen as dogmatic.
Mugny (1982) states that for maximum impact, the minority should be
consistent with regard to their argument position, but should also appear openminded and reasonable.
The role of social influence
processes in social change
Social change: changes in attitudes,
behaviour and/or laws which take place
on a large scale and affect society.
Most research into minority influence focuses on the effects of minorities on
individuals (e.g. changing people’s attitudes). However, minority groups can also
play an important role in producing social change.
Examples of minority groups changing social attitudes:
UK Civil Partnership Act (2004) – recognition of gay relationships by the law
Civil Marriages Act (2013) – allowed gay couples to enter marriages recognised in
law
Prislin and Filson (2009) note that while some minority groups aim to change
social structures, others campaign for tolerance for their way of life and for the
right to live without persecution or discrimination
Moscovici’s Conversion Theory
1. A distinct and consistent minority position is put forward by a
majority group (e.g. Suffragettes – women’s right to vote)
2. Majority group members examine the arguments. If there are
negative consequences of adopting the argument of the minority
attitude change is private and tends to be gradual.
3. Over time, there is a public acceptance of the minority
position as most members come to agree with the stance taken
(e.g. women should have the right to vote)