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Social Influence A-Level Psychology (year 1)
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A* notes on social influence in Alevel Psychology course in year 1 (year 12)
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SOCIAL INFLUENCETypes of conformity: internalisation, identification and compliance
● Aronson defined conformity as a change in a person’s behavior or opinions as a
result of real or imagined social pressure
● Kelman (1958) suggested 3 levels of conformity: Compliance (shallow),
Identification (intermediate) and internalisation (deep).
1. Compliance is publicly conforming to the group behaviours/ideas, but
privately keeping one’s own personal opinions. It results in a temporary
change in behaviour.
2. Identification is where an individual values membership of a group and so
will conform to their behaviour and ideas publicly and privately in order to
feel part of said group, but doesn’t fully agree so will revert to personal
ideas/behaviours if separated from the group for long enough. So this form of
conformity is temporary, but longer lasting than compliance.
3. Internalisation is the deepest form of conformity. The individual’s personal
opinions genuinely change to match those of the group. This is a permanent
change in beliefs
Explanations for conformity: informational social influence and normative
social influence
The two explanations of conformity are informational social influence and normative social
influence.
★ Informational social influence (ISI) occurs in situations where the correct
behaviour is unclear, so individuals look to the majority for guidance how to behave
because they want to be correct. ISI often results in internalisation, that is,
permanently adopting the views of the majority.
★ Normative social influence (NSI) occurs in situations where individuals want to
appear to be normal and one of the majority so that they are approved of and not
rejected. NSI often results in compliance, or a superficial change in behaviour
without change in personal values.
Variables affecting conformity including group size, unanimity and task
difficulty as investigated by Asch
● A piece of research supporting normative social influence (and thus compliance) is
Asch’s (1951) study.
● Aim: Asch wanted to examine the extent to which social pressure from a majority
could cause a person to conform.
, ● Procedure: Asch’s sample consisted of 50 male students from Swarthmore College
in America, who believed they were taking part in a vision test. Asch used a line
judgement task, where he placed one real naïve participant in a room with seven
confederates (actors), who had agreed their answers in advance. The real participant
was deceived and was led to believe that the other seven people were also real
participants. The real participant always sat second to last.
● In turn, each person had to say out loud which line (A, B or C) was most like the
target line in length
● The correct answer was always obvious. Each participant completed 18 trials and the
confederates gave the same incorrect answer on 12 trials, called critical trials. Asch
wanted to see if the real participant would conform to the majority view, even when
the answer was clearly incorrect.
● Asch measured the number of times each participant conformed to the majority
view.
● Findings: On average, the real participants conformed to the incorrect answers on
32% of the critical trials. 74% of the participants conformed on at least one critical
trial compared to 0.04% in a control group, and 26% of the participants never
conformed. Asch also used a control group, in which one real participant completed
the same experiment without any confederates. He found that less than 1% of the
participants gave an incorrect answer.
● Asch interviewed his participants after the experiment to find out why they
conformed. Most of the participants said that they knew their answers were
incorrect, but they went along with the group in order to fit in, or because they
thought they would be ridiculed.
● Conclusions: This confirms that participants conformed due to normative social
influence and the desire to fit in.
Evaluation of Asch
★ Generalisability- Asch used a biased sample (50 male students from Swarthmore
College in America). Therefore, we cannot generalise the results to other
populations, for example female students, and we are unable to conclude if female
students would have conformed in a similar way to male students. As a result Asch’s
sample lacks population validity and further research is required to determine
whether males and females conform in the same way.
★ Reliability- As a standard procedure was used this study has high internal reliability
as it can be easily replicated to obtain the same results.
★ Application- Asch’s experiment has low levels of ecological validity. Asch’s test of
conformity, a line judgement task, is an artificial task, which does not reflect
conformity in everyday life. Consequently, we are unable to generalise the results of
Asch to other real life situations, such as why people may start smoking or drinking
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