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Summary Edexcel A Level Psychology Notes - Social Psychology
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A* notes for the Social Psychology Module at A Level - the ONLY notes you need for this course!
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1Social Psychology
- Understanding human behaviour by examining relationships between individuals, groups,
societies and cultures
- Areas of interest are prejudice and obedience
- Focuses on individual, but more on how an individual fits in with others within a society
- Focus on interactions between people; issues such as crowd behaviour, helping others
1.1 Content
1.1.1 Theories of Obedience
Obedience:
- Obedience - When you follow orders given by a person with authority over you
- Obeying means you are in an agentic state. E.g. someone moves car as parking attendant
tells them
- Conformity - Doing something against your own inclinations but without intending to
match the behaviour of the majority
- Compliance - Going along with what someone says without agreeing to it (usually peers)
- Internalising - Obeying with agreement
- Social Influence - When an individual’s behavior, attitudes and emotions are affected by
those of another
- Confederate - Someone who helps someone else to do something
Why Knowing About Obedience is Useful:
- Members of armed forces who obey orders - defense can be made that they were in
agentic state and gave responsibility to the one in orders
- In trial, psychology can use results of studies to show that some actions that go against
society’s moral code might still be carried out by someone under similar circumstances
Agency Theory:
- Based on the assumption that our social system lead to obedience
- Milgram suggests that people actually have 2 states of behavior when they are in a social
situation: Autonomous and Agentic states
- In an autonomous state one is under his/her own control and has the power to make one’s
own decisions
- We perceive ourselves to be responsible for our own behaviour so feel guilt
- This is shown after 300V in Milgram’s experiment, where 35% of the participants switched
from an agentic state to an autonomous state and decided to withdraw from the
experiment
- Moral strain occurs when people are asked to do something they would not choose to do
themselves and they feel is immoral or unjust
- The moral strain results in an individual feeling very uncomfortable in the situation and in
extreme situations they show anxiety and distress
- Milgram’s participants displayed defence mechanisms to lessen moral strain by being in
denial that the shocks were dangerous, avoiding looking at the experimenter or helping the
learner by stressing the correct answer
, 2
- In an agentic state individuals act as agents for other, their own consciences are not in
control
- People do not feel responsible for their actions and feel that they have no power so they
might well act against their own moral code, as what happened in Milgram ’s basic study
- This is shown when the experimenter told the participants that he/she would take the
responsibility and then the participant continued
- A shift into an agentic state relives moral strain as the individual displaces responsibility
onto the authority figure
- Milgram suggested that 2 things must be in place in order for a person to enter the agentic
state:
o Person giving orders is perceived as being qualified to direct other p eople’s
behavior. That is, they are seen as legitimate
o The person being ordered about is able to believe that the authority figure will
accept responsibility for others actions
- An agentic state involves a shift in responsibility from the person carrying out an order to
the person in authority giving the order - the responsibility is ‘given’ to the one doing the
ordering
Strengths:
- Explains the different levels of obedience found in the variations of Milgram’s study
- In the basic study, the participants did not take responsibility and said they were just doing
what they were told
- However, as they were made to take responsibility, because they had to, for instance,
having to hold the victim’s hand down to administer the shocks, the obedience level
decreased
- As they moved away from the agentic state, fewer participants obeyed up to shock level
450V
- Evidence from different studies reinforces the agency theory as an explanation for
obedience as the participants showed overt signs of moral strain when giving an order
- When he debriefed them, many reported their behaviour was the responsibility of the
experimenter and that they had not wanted to do it - Provides evidence for the
displacement of responsibility
- Helps to explain the issue that triggered Milgram’s research into obedience, such as the
Holocaust
- Helps to explain inexplicable actions such as the Holocaust and other atrocities such as My
Lai Massacre during Vietnam war - a small village called My Lai was approached by
American soldiers who were ordered to shoot the occupants who were suspected of being
Vietcong soldiers
- Lieutenant Calley instructed his division to enter the village and shoot, despite no return of
fire
- American soldiers massacred old men, women and children in the village
- In the court, claimed was just following orders
- Offers support for agency theory involving a displacement of responsibility
- Meeus and Raaijmakers’ (1986) study found that participants would obey an authority
figure and give insults to someone they thought was a job applicant
- 22/24 were fully obedient and delivered all 15 insults with level of opposition low
- Hofling et al (1996) staged study in hospital setting
- Doctor phoned nurse asking her to administer twice the daily dose of a drug to a patient
, 3
- Against hospital policy doctor said would sign the prescription later - 21/22 nurses followed
the orders
- Several of the nurses justified their behaviour as being a result of the hierarchy of authority
Weaknesses:
- More of a description of how society works, than an explanation
- It suggests that participants obeyed because they were agents of authority
- However, obedience is defined as obeying authority figures, so agency theory does not
explain in that much more detail why obedience occurs
- The theory says that people are agents of others in society because that is the way society
works, and natural selection means that people have evolved to obey those in ‘higher’
positions however, there is no evidence for this
- However, as similar hierarchal systems exist in animal groups, such as primates with similar
sanctions for obedience, it can be inferred that it has evolved to serve some form of
survival function for social groups
- It does not explain individual differences in obedience
- It is important that a significant minority of Milgram’s participants held their ground and
did not obey him, suggesting that there may be other factors involved in why people do or
do not obey
- Does not explain motivational issues behind obedience
- French and Raven (1959) identified 5 bases of power, which are said to motivate and
influence behaviour; legitimate power, reward power, expert power and coercive power
- These factors are said to provide a better explanation of obedience, and certainly provide a
better explanation for Milgram’s findings from his experiments
- Could be due to personality (authoritarian personality), gender etc
- Alternative theory is Social Impact Theory
Social Impact Theory:
- Bibb Latané (1981) proposed a theory of social influence that can be used to explain why
people are obedient
- It looks at the functioning of individuals in the presence of others
- Latané looks at attitudes and impacts of others on an individual’s attitude
- He proposed that we are greatly influenced by the actions of others; we can be persuaded,
inhibited, threatened and supported by other people
- These effects are the result of others’ actions, and affect changes to how we feel and how
we act in response
- This is known as social impact because of how others, real or imagined, impact on us
- More specifically, Latané referred to targets and sources of social influence
- The target referred to the person being impacted on and the source being the influencer
- Social force is a pressure put on people to change their behaviour
- He developed a formulation of different principles that result in more or less social force
being exerted on the target
- Although these principles refer to social influence in general (conformity, bystander
behaviour etc), they can also be used to explain obedience
- It predicts that conformity will increase with increasing strength, immediacy and number of
influence in a group - Greater these are, the greater the impact
, 4
o Strength - How important the influencing group of people are to you (status,
authority, age)
o E.g. if they are popular or you want to be friends with them - peer pressure
o Milgram - obedience greater if wearing a lab coat/experiment 13 in less prestigious
setting
o Immediacy - How close the group are to you at the time of influence (proximity,
distance)
o E.g. your friend asking you to do something on text has less effect than someone
asking you on the phone or in person
o Milgram’s variations over phone – experiment 7
o Number - How many people there are in the group
o More people = more pressure for you to conform
o E.g. may be persuaded to go to a uni because a large number of friends go
- In terms of obedience, this suggests that authority figures who are perceived to be
legitimate, who are immediate to the individual and who are greater in number, will be
more likely to ensure obedience
- Theory can be represented as a mathematical formula i= f(SIN)
- Impact = function of (strength of sources x immediacy of sources x number of sources)
Psychosocial Law:
- Not simply the case that S, I and N of the source increases, so does the social impact they
have on the target
- The effect is more like that of a lightbulb in a dark room
- One lightbulb will have a dramatic effect, a second will improve the lighting conditions but
as more lightbulbs are added, the effect becomes less pronounced
- Berkowitz Bickman and Milgram (1969) - Counted the percentage of bystanders who also
looked up
- When there was one confederate looking up, 42% of people looked up
- When there were 15 confederates looking up, 86% of people looked up
- With each additional person from here however, the impact got smaller
- Effect eventually levels off as the number of passes by grew smaller relative to the size of
the confederate group
Multiplication Versus Division of Impact:
- SIN can have a multiplicative effect (up to a point) but there is also a divisional effect of
social impact
- Consider a speaker giving a speech to a large audience
- The ability of the speaker to persuade the audience is divided among many members of the
audience - a divisional effect
- The number of targets to be influenced affects the impact of the source
- Latané and Darley (1970) demonstrated this divisional effect of social influence in a number
studies on bystander behaviour
- Found that a lone person was more likely to help someone in need compared to a group of
people; there was diffusion of responsibility similar to divisional effect
- In terms of obedience, would suggest that an authority figure would have diminished
capacity to influence someone if that someone had an ally or group of allies
- This is because the more of you there are, the less personal responsibility each of you will
feel
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