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A-level Psychology
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This is the full A-level notes for Psychology AQA for the latest spec for those sitting their exams on 2021 and onwards.
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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 because
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 to feel part of
said group but does not 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 majorities 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 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 answers and were more likely to conform to wrong answers the more
difficult the questions became.
This study demonstrates that Asch’s research is still relevant today, and that even
when not face to face the desire to conform for normative (and informational) social
reasons is still present.
Asch’s study may have suffered from demand characteristics. This is because Asch’s
confederates were not actors, so may have acted differently to the normal participants,
causing the participants to pretend to conform because they thought that that was what
, was expected of them in the experiment, reducing the study’s generalisability and
internal validity.
Ethics- Asch’s research is ethically questionable. He broke several ethical guidelines,
including deception and protection from harm. Asch deliberately deceived his
participants, saying that they were taking part in a vision test and not an experiment
on conformity. Although it is seen as unethical to deceive participants, Asch’s
experiment required deception to achieve valid results. If the participants were aware
of the true aim, they would have displayed demand characteristics and acted
differently. In addition, Asch’s participants were not protected from psychological
harm and many of the participants reporting feeling stressed when they disagreed with
the majority. However, Asch interviewed all his participants following the experiment
to overcome this issue.
Asch’s variation studies
Variation 1: Group size- Asch found only 3% conformity with one confederate, 13%
with two confederates, and 33% with three confederates, not increasing past 33% as
the group became larger.
Variation 2: Unanimity- If the confederate gives the right answer just before the
participant’s turn to answer, conformity drops to 5.5%. This rate of conformity stayed
the same even if the confederate gave a different wrong answer to the rest of the
group. This may be because another person going against the majority gives the
participant emotional support to dissent.
Variation 3: Task difficulty- Asch made the difference between the line lengths
smaller and found that conformity increased when the task was more difficult. This is
the informational social influence effect.
A piece of research supporting informational social influence (and thus
internalisation) is research is Jenness’ (1932) study. Jennets used an ambiguous
situation that involved a glass bottle filled with 811 white beans. His sample consisted
of 101 psychology students, who individually estimated how many beans the glass
bottle contained. Participants were then dividing into groups of three and asked to
provide a group estimate through discussion. Following the discussion, the
participants were provided with another opportunity individually estimate the number
of beans, to see if they changed their original answer.
The average initial estimate of the male students was 790 beans. After conferring with
the other participants this changed to 695 beans. The average initial estimate of the
female students was 925 beans. After conferring with the other participants this
changed to 878 beans. Jenness found that nearly all participants changed their original
answer, when they were provided with another opportunity to estimate the number of
beans in the glass bottle. These results demonstrate the power of conformity in an
ambiguous situation and are likely to be the result of informational social influence.
The participants in this experiment changed their answers because they believed the
group estimate was more likely to be right than their own individual estimate,
showing informational social influence.
Evaluation
Jenness’ study lacks mundane realism as estimating the number of beans in a jar is not
an everyday task.
Only used American students, so ethnocentric and not generalisable to people in other
cultures.
, Conformity to social roles as investigated by Zimbardo.
A study on internalisation is Zimbardo’s (1973) prison experiment.
Aim: Zimbardo aimed to investigate whether the reason for the high levels of
aggression observed in American prisons was due to the prisoners’ and/or guards’
dispositions, or due to the situation that was the prison environment itself.
Procedure: To test this, he created a fake prison in the basement of Stanford
university. 21 male students rated as the most physically and mentally stable were
selected from 75 volunteers who responded to the newspaper advert. They were
randomly allocated such that 10 were assigned to be guards, and 11 were assigned to
be prisoners.
The prisoners were given a realistic arrest at their homes by local police, so were
fingerprinted, stripped, and deloused. They were given a basic prison uniform and an
identification number to dehumanise them. They had to follow strict rules during the
day. Guards worked in 8 hour shifts in groups of three. They had complete control
and were given uniforms, clubs, handcuffs, and mirrored sunglasses to prevent eye
contact between prisoner and guards.
Findings: Prisoners and guards quickly began conforming to their social roles. By
two days the prisoner revolted against their poor treatment by the guards and by six
days the rest of the two-week experiment was cancelled early due to fears for prisoner
mental health.
Conclusion: Participants in the experiment conformed to their social roles within the
prison, showing the situational power of the prison environment to change behaviour.
Evaluation
Generalisability- There could be cultural/temporal differences in the way guards and
prisoner are perceived, as Zimbardo’s sample were Americans in the 1970s and
Reichler and Haslam’s sample were English people in the 2010s. Modern English
people may perceive the role of a prisoner to be aggressive and disorderly, and a
guard to be calm and controlled, whereas the Americans may expect a prisoner to be
fearful and obedient, and a guard to be an authoritarian disciplinarian. Therefore, this
would suggest that whilst both may be valid examples of participants internalising
their roles, the procedure and hypotheses may have to be adjusted for different
cultures and eras to produce reliable results.
Reliability- Reichler and Haslam (2011) tried to recreate the Stanford Prison study
in a programme for the BBC. However, in this simulation prisoners became dominant
over the guards and became disobedient to the guards who were unable to control
their behaviour.
This suggests that the results of Zimbardo’s study may be down to individual
differences. The reason his guards had such control over the prisoners was perhaps
because all or most of those randomly assigned to be guards were those with more
dominant personalities, and all or most of the prisoners had more
submissive/agreeable personalities.
Application- Zimbardo’s study be a failure as despite his findings, as American
prisons remain places of excessive violence on the part of both prisoner and guards,
so situational factors continue to affect prisoner behaviour.
Validity- Zimbardo used his study to argue that the prison situation causes guards to
become aggressive, however only ⅓ of the guards were excessively aggressive. ⅓
stayed neutral and another ⅓ tried to help the prisoners by relaxing rules and giving
out cigarettes. It is thought that prisoner and guards may have been acting according
to stereotypes rather than conforming to social roles, imitating depictions of prisoner
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