The Role of Authoritarianism in Obedience: A Study of Milgram's Experiment, Slides of Psychology

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AS PSYCHOLOGY

REVISION

SOCIAL INFLUENCE

3.1.1 Social influence Specification

• Types of conformity: internalisation, identification and compliance. Explanations for conformity: - informational social influence and normative social influence, and variables affecting conformity including group size, unanimity and task difficulty as investigated by Asch.
• Conformity to social roles as investigated by Zimbardo.
• Explanations for obedience: agentic state and legitimacy of authority, and situational variables affecting obedience including proximity, location and uniform, as investigated by Milgram.
• Dispositional explanation for obedience: the Authoritarian Personality.
• Explanations of resistance to social influence, including social support and locus of control.
• Minority influence including reference to consistency, commitment and flexibility.
• The role of social influence processes in social change.

TYPES OF CONFORMITY

• INTERNALISATION – occurs when an individual accepts influence because the content of the attitude or behaviour proposed is consistent with their own value system (i.e. examined their own beliefs and the groups’ position; resulting in believing the group are correct) - Changes public and private view
• IDENTIFICATION – a form of influence where an individual adopts an attitude or behaviour because they want to be associated with a particular person or group - A mix of internalisation (accepts attitudes/behaviours of the group as right and true) and compliance (as the purpose of adopting them is to be accepted as a member of the group)

EXPLANATIONS FOR CONFORMITY

• NORMATIVE SOCIAL INFLUENCE – is a form of influence whereby an individual conforms with the expectations of the majority in order to gain approval or to avoid social disapproval (the need to be accepted) - The individual must believe they are under surveillance by the group - Linked to compliance
• INFORMATIONAL SOCIAL INFLUENCE – is a form of influence, which is the result of a desire to be right – looking to others (especially if the situation is ambiguous or where others are experts) as a way of gaining evidence about reality - Individuals don’t just comply in behaviour, but also change their behaviour in line with the group position - Linked to internalisation

DIFFICULTIES IN DISTINGUISHING BETWEEN

COMPLIANCE AND INTERNALISATION

• It is assumed that someone who publicly agrees with a majority but disagrees with them in private must be showing compliance - However, it is possible that acceptance occurred in public but dissipates later in private due to forgetting the information given by the group
• It is also assumed that someone who agrees with the group in public and in private must have internalised the views of the group - However, it is possible that they may have been just complying in public, but as a result of self-perception (attitude determined by interpreting the meaning of their own behaviour), they come to accept that position as their own

RESEARCH SUPPORT FOR NORMATIVE

INFLUENCE

• Linkenbach and Perkins (2003) found that

adolescents exposed to the simple message that the majority of their peers did not smoke were less likely to take up smoking

• Schultz et al (2008) found that hotel guests

exposed to the normative message that 75% of guests reused their towels each day reduced their own towel use by 25%

• These studies support the claim that people

shape their behaviour out of a desire to fit in with their reference group

NORMATIVE INFLUENCE MAY NOT BE

DETECTED

• Research on conformity has led to the conclusion

that normative influence has a powerful effect on the behaviour of the individual

• Researchers have started to speculate whether

individuals do actually recognise the behaviour of others as a causal factor in their own behaviour

• Nolan et al (2008) found that people believed that the behaviour of neighbours had the least impact on their own energy saving, yet results showed that it had the strongest impact
• This suggests that people rely on beliefs about what should motivate their behaviour so under-detect the impact of normative influence

INFORMATIONAL INFLUENCE IS MODERATED

BY TYPE OF TASK

• A problem for informational explanation of conformity is that features of the task moderate the impact of majority influence
• For some judgements there are clear non-social criteria or validation which places them into the realm of physical reality - E.g. deciding whether Bristol is the most highly populated city in the South West of England (it can be determined through objective means - i.e. stats etc)
• However, other judgements like deciding if Bristol is the most fun city in the South West of England cannot be made using objective criteria as it does not exist - Instead, these kinds of judgements must be made on the basis of social consensus (i.e. what other people believe the case to be) - As a result, majorities should exert greater influence on issues of social rather than physical reality, and this is precisely what research tends to show (Laughlin, 1999)

ASCH (1956) PROCEDURE

• 123 male American undergraduates recruited for a

‘vision test’

• In each experiment all but one were confederates
• In turn, participants and confederates were asked to

state which of three lines was the same length as a stimulus line

• The real participant always answered last or second

to last

• Confederates would give the same incorrect answer

for 12 out of 18 trials

ASCH (1956) FINDINGS

• For the 12 critical trials , 33% of responses given by

participants were incorrect (conforming with the incorrect responses given by confederates)

• ¼ of the participants never conformed on any of the

critical trials

• ½ of the participants conformed on 6 or more of the

critical trials

• One in 20 of the participants conformed on all 12 of the

critical trials

• In a control trial (without the distraction of

confederates giving the wrong answers), only 1% of responses given by participants were incorrect

VARIABLES

AFFECTING

CONFORMITY

GROUP SIZE

• Asch found that there was very little

conformity when the majority was just one or two confederates

• However, under the pressure of a majority

of three confederates, the proportion of conforming responses jumped up to about 30%

• Further increases in size of the majority did

not increase this level of conformity substantially, indicating that the size of the majority is important but only up to a point

THE UNANIMITY OF THE MAJORITY

• In Asch’s original study, the confederates

unanimously gave the same wrong answer

• When the participant was given the support

of either another participant or a confederate who had been instructed to give the right answers throughout, conformity levels dropped significantly, reducing the percentage of wrong answers from 33% to just 5.5%

THE UNANIMITY OF THE MAJORITY

• In another condition a lone “dissenter”; also

a confederate, gave an answer that was different to the majority and different from the true answer

• Conformity rates dropped to 9%, which was nearly as big a fall as when the dissenter provided support for the real participant by giving the same answer
• This led Asch to conclude that it was

breaking in the group’s unanimous position that was the major factor in conformity reductions