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AQA Alevel Psychology Social Influence Notes
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AQA Alevel Psychology Social Influence Notes
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Conformity, types of conformity and explanations- Conformity: a change in a persons behaviour or opinions as a results of real or imagined
pressure from a person or a group of people
- Compliance: temporal type of conformity, we outwardly go along with the majority view but
privately disagree with it. Only changes our behaviour and lasts as long as the group is
monitoring us, going along with others
- Identification: we value membership of the group so we conform to be apart of the group,
might not agree with what they say but public ally change our opinions to be accepted by
group
- Internalisation: deep type of conformity where we take on the majority view because we
accept it as correct, permanent change in opinions and behaviour even when the group is
absent
- Deutsch and Gerard 1955 suggested two explanations of conformity, the need to be right
and the need to be liked
Informational social influence, the desire to be right, we look to others who we believe are
right especially in ambiguity situation, situational ambiguity, leads to perming change in our
behaviour, internalisation
Normative social influence, the desire to be liked, we want to fit in and so out behaviour is
based on social norms , results in temporary change in behaviour in order to go along with
the group, compliance
Evaluation
- Evidence supporting NSI: Asch study, real participant surrounded by 7 confederates asked to
pick matching line lengths, confederates picked the wrong one and ask found that 36.8% of
participants conformed on average for all the trials, people said they conformed to avoid
being rejected, showed people will show complaint behaviour in order to fit in
- Evidence supporting ISI: Jenness 1933 asked particle to guess the number of jelly beans in a
jar, ambiguous situation, then make second guess after talking in group, answers became
more similar and people conformed by saying the answer that they thought made more
sense in the group demonstrating conforming in order to be right, lack mundane realism
- Asch study was 123 American students, not representative of the whole population
therefore can’t generalise findings, ignores collectivist cultures that think group unity is
more important and had gender bias, beta bias ignores differences between genders also
lacked mundane realism ask situation wasn’t like real life situation.
- Some people are able to resist social pressures to conformity
Asch research into conformity
- Aim: test conformity under an non ambiguous task, matching line length together
- Procedure: 123 male American students, told it was perception test but was to see if they
conformed in situation with clear answer, one naïve participant, seven confederates told to
give wrong answer to see if naïve participant conformed by giving the wrong answer or give
their own answer
- Findings:average of 36.6% participants conformed and 25% always remained independent
but 75% conformed at least in one of the trials, people conformed not to ‘spoil’ the results,
to avoid rejection by the majority
- Found variables affecting conformity, group size, unanimity, take difficulty
Group size: the larger the majority of confederates the increase in conformity, the pressure
to conform increased
Unanimity: disturbance of the majority’s unanimity had effect, real participant was given
support of a truthful participant and conformity decreased, people felt like they didn’t want
to ruin the results by giving a different answer but when one person did it they did it to and
didn’t conform
, Task difficulty: when line lengths were made more similar it was harder to judge the correct
answer and so conformity increased, the more difficult the task the greater the conformity
Evaluation
- Controlled lab conditions, able to isolate and control the variables in order to see the effect
on the participants, look for cause and effect relationship. Experiment could be replicated, if
there was consistency in the results this increased reliability to the findings
- Cultural differences: research doesn’t account for cultural differences, psychologist review
31 studies of conformity and found that people in collectivist cultures show higher levels of
conformity compared to individualistic, people emphasise locality to the group. Levels of
conformity may be higher than what Asch found, culturally bias
- Ethical issues: deception, lack of informed consent and psychological harm, didn’t know they
were being tricked and didn’t know true purpose of the study, may behave differently, some
participants might found it distressing being in that sort of situation due to the pressure,
question credibility of psychological research
Zimbardo, conforming to social roles.
- Aim: to investigate how readily people would conform to new social roles, observed how
quickly people adopted roles of guard or prisoner, wanted to find out if brutality reported
amongst guards in America was due to sadistic personalities dispositional explanation or
because of prison environment, situational explanation
- Procedure: male participants were given $15 a day to take part in a 2-week stimulation study
of prison life, randomly allocated roles, police ‘arrested’ 10 prisoners publicly blindfolded
them and strip searched. Guards wore uniform, no physical harm is permitted.
- Findings: guards abused, harassed and humiliated the prisoners, conforming to the social
role, study had to be discontinued after six days due to the violence, prisoners first rebelled
the guard but by day 6 everyone had conformed. By the end of day 1, one prisoner had to be
released and by day four two more had to be released due to depression and anxiety.
- Conclusion: two factors to explain conforming behaviour of the participants. Stereotypes
roles and deindividuation
Stereotyped roles, people will conform to social roles they are expected to play.
Deindividuation, the loss of personal identity, prisoners were stripped of their identity, led to
weakening of self-identity.
Evaluation
- Lack of realism: because the experiment was role play, you can argue that the participants
acted in a way to support stereotypes of how guards and prisoners are supposed to behave,
this explains their behaviour as them doing what they actually think they have to do and not
conforming into social roles.
- Control over variables: carefully the selection of the participants, they pretested them to
gain emotionally stable individuals and then assigned to the toles of guard or prisoner to
minimise induvial differences as explanation of findings. Having control increases internal
validity of the study, can be more confident when drawing conclusions about the influence
of roles on behaviour.
- Ethical issues: lack of full informed consent and lack of protection from harm. The
participants didn’t know they would be arrested at their home and Zimbardo thought
withholding this information was justifiable, the participants experienced extreme distress
and humiliation, and this could have had long lasting effects, the guards may have been
distressed that they had to treat the prisoners with brutality. Zimbardo’s follow up
interviews found no long-lasting negative effects.
- Ethical consideration: Zimbardo conducted debriefs after the experiment by weeks and
ensured the participants didn’t suffer any long-lasting effects, this ensured psychological
harm was minimised and Zimbardo argued that the benefits gained and knowledge gained
outweighs the negative distress of the study.
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