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Social Influence revision notes
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Includes all topics in Social Influence using the textbook, AQA A level Psychology revision guide. Includes both AO1 and AO3. All psychologists names are highlighted.
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Social influence:Types of conformity:
Conformity: change of a person’s behaviour/opinions because of peer pressure.
Compliance: publicly changing your behaviour in a group but privately don’t change. Superficial
change.
Identification: Changing your behaviour both publicly and privately in a group because there is
something we value.
Internalisation: Changing our behaviours both publicly and privately because we want to
conform to group norms. Permanent change because the behaviour is internalized.
Deutsch and Gerard proposed the two-process theory.
ISI: (Informative social influence) = Conforming to people’s behaviour and opinions because we
think it’s right. Cognitive process. Temporary change.
NSI: (Normative social influence) = Conforming to people’s behaviour and opinions because you
have a fear of rejection. Emotional process. Permanent change.
Evaluation:
Empirical evidence for NSI. Schultz et al found that 73% of hotel guests used the same towels
after getting a message that most people reuse them. This shows that people conform to other
people’s behaviours as they want to fit in. Even if they act differently to everyone else.
Supportive research for ISI. Lucas et al gave easy to difficult mathematical problems to
participants. He found that there was a higher level of conformity when the problem was
difficult whereas when it was easy. This shows that people conform to what they think is right.
This also shows that depending on how difficult something is, it affects how much that person
will conform. This supports the two-process theory.
A limitation is that there are individual differences. McGhee and Teevan found that ‘nAffiliators’
care a lot about being liked, have many relationships with others and are really concerned
about what people think of them. They conform to people’s behaviours and opinions because
of NSI. This suggests that there are different levels to extreme whether a person will conform or
not. Therefore, this means that the two-process theory is incomplete as it doesn’t consider
individual differences.
Another limitation is that it is not easy to differentiate between ISI and NSI. For example, a
unanimous group leads to disapproval. It could either take the approach of rejection (NSI) or
that everyone is right apart from you (ISI). This shows that distinction is not useful as we don’t
, when each of the processes are operating. Therefore, we cannot distinguish between each
process meaning that it is oversimplified.
Asch research:
Baseline study-
Aim: to see whether individuals will conform to group pressure even if the task is unambiguous.
Method: 123 male undergraduates, lab experiment
Procedure: 6-8 confederates with a naive participant at the last or 2 nd last of the group to
answer. They were given a standard line and 3 comparison lines and had to find the most
similar line. 12 out of the 18 trials were when the confederates gave the wrong answer.
Results: 75% conformed at least once. 33% conformed across all times. They were interviewed
after and said that the majority knew the write answer but conformed to the group because of
a fear of rejection.
Conclusion: Groups do conform to group pressure even if the task is unambiguous, also known
as ‘The Asch effect’. It also supports the NSI explanation of conformity which is to fit in.
Variables effecting conformity-
Group size: 1-2 confederates 13.6% 3 confederates 30% 4 confederates 33% same after that
Task difficulty: made the comparison lines more like the standard line. The more difficult the
task was they are more likely to conform.
Unanimity: one of the confederates was a ‘dissenter’ and would give a different answer to the
others. Conformity rates dropped down to 5.5%
Evaluation-
Cultural differences: Smith et al found that in individualistic cultures 25% conformed whereas in
collectivists cultures 37% conformed. Therefore, it lacks generalisability to all cultures as in his
research he used only Americans.
Lacks external validity: used lab experiments so was controlled which means that there must
have been demand characteristics. This is because the participants were also told about the
research’s aim, which could have affected the results, meaning Asch wasn’t measuring
conformity. This means that Asch’s results can’t be applied in the real world.
‘a child of its time. This study was conducted during the 1950s so post WW2 meaning that lots
of people conformed during this time. This could have affected the results as external factors
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