Lecture notes
social Influence full notes
Pscyhology alevel aqa notes
[Show more]
Seller
Follow
Content preview
Types 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 around friends, and
therefore these results are limited in their application to everyday life.
★ Validity- Perrin and Spencer (1980) did a replication of Asch’s original study with
British engineering students and found over 396 trials that only one student conformed.
This means that Asch’s study may suffer from lack temporal validity and have limited
population validity, in that participants were American and so may have originally
conformed due to the significant political pressure to conform there due to the Red Scare
of the 1950s.
- However, engineering students are more familiar with measurement than the general
population, so it could be argued that this sample was biased and so the results were
invalid.
★ However Rosander (2011) supports Asch’s findings. Rosander used Facebook, Twitter,
and other online communities to investigate the effect of task difficulty on conformity.
Logic and general knowledge questions were posted for participants to answer.
Rosander’s confederates would then answer these questions, providing wrong answers
to half of the participants. Results showed that participants would conform to the wrong
The benefits of buying summaries with Stuvia:
Guaranteed quality through customer reviews
Stuvia customers have reviewed more than 700,000 summaries. This how you know that you are buying the best documents.
Quick and easy check-out
You can quickly pay through credit card for the summaries. There is no membership needed.
Focus on what matters
Your fellow students write the study notes themselves, which is why the documents are always reliable and up-to-date. This ensures you quickly get to the core!
Frequently asked questions
What do I get when I buy this document?
You get a PDF, available immediately after your purchase. The purchased document is accessible anytime, anywhere and indefinitely through your profile.
Satisfaction guarantee: how does it work?
Our satisfaction guarantee ensures that you always find a study document that suits you well. You fill out a form, and our customer service team takes care of the rest.
Who am I buying these notes from?
Stuvia is a marketplace, so you are not buying this document from us, but from seller dpower111. Stuvia facilitates payment to the seller.
Will I be stuck with a subscription?
No, you only buy these notes for £7.49. You're not tied to anything after your purchase.
Can Stuvia be trusted?
4.6 stars on Google & Trustpilot (+1000 reviews)
64438 documents were sold in the last 30 days
Founded in 2010, the go-to place to buy revision notes and other study material for 14 years now