UNIT CONTENTSocial influence

• Obedience: Milgram, factors affecting. Situational versus personality factors (* e.g. Adorno)

• Conformity versus individuality: need for, nature of

• Kelman; compliance, identification, internalisation

Groups and individuals

• Roles within groups, e.g. Zimbardo

• Leadership: types of leaders

Group behaviour and decision making

• In-group/out-group prejudice (Tajfel, Turner)

• Groupthink (risky shift, consensus)

• Crowd behaviour

JUST FOLLOWING ORDERS

HOW DO APPARENTLY NORMAL PEOPLE TURN INTO BRUTAL KILLERS?

• This question is fundamentally a psychological question

• Psychology has been trying to explain the holocaust since the end of WWII

A process in which an individual’s attitudes and/or behaviour are influenced by another person or group.

SOCIAL INFLUENCE

HISTORY1879 Wundt – goal of psychology to study the contents of the mind, or consciousness through

the method of introspection

First half of 20th Century Behaviourists dominated American academic psychology- Watson, Skinner. Watson wanted to create an objective, experimental science of behaviour that dismissed attempts to study inner experience as pseudoscientific.

Social psychology as an experimental science is less than 100 years old – led by Allport , Lewin

GORDON W. ALLPORT'S (1954) DEFINITION OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY:

• an attempt to understand and explain how the thought, feeling and behavior of individuals is influenced by the actual, imagined or implied presence of others• Allport's definition based on idea that social psychology is study of social

influence

• Central task of social psychology from this perspective: to explain the ways in which interaction between people affects the way they think and behave

• Term "social influence" encapsulates some of major areas in social psychology, such as: persuasion, attitude change, conformity.

Social psychologists adopting the influence view, pose such questions as:

• How are people influenced?

• Why do people let themselves be influenced?

• Do certain factors increase/decrease the effectiveness of social influence?

• When we've been influenced by others, is this influence permanent or transitory?

• What variables affect whether the effects of influence are permanent or transitory?

CONFORMITY AND OBEDIENCE

Aim: To analyse individual behaviour and how it is influenced in a social context particularly with respect to conformity and obedience.

MILGRAM’S APPROACH• What set Milgram’s contribution apart was his use of scientific laboratory equipment to

shed light on perpetrator’s behaviour.

THIS EXPERIMENTAL APPROACH ACHIEVED TWO THINGS:

1. It brought a degree of objectivity to a topic that didn’t lend itself to dispassionate analysis

2. It brought the topic ‘closer to home’ and made it more difficult for people who learnt about the experiments to distance themselves from their implications.

MILGRAM• Like most social psychologists Milgram was a situationist – that a person’s immediate

situation affects a persons behaviour.

• But what made his research stand out was his ability to go beyond the visible situational forces and demonstrate the power of invisible features of the situation e.g. unverbalised social rules.

THE OBEDIENCE TO AUTHORITY EXPERIMENTParticipants were told that the study would look at the relationship of punishment in learning, and that one person would be the teacher, and the other would be the learner (a confederate), and that these roles would be determined by a random draw.

The learner was then strapped into a chair, and electrodes are attached to their arm. It was explained to both the teacher and the learner that the electrodes were attached to an electric shock generator, and that shocks would serve as punishment for incorrect answers.

http://www3.niu.edu/acad/psych/Millis/History/2003/stanley_milgram.htm#Obedience to Authority

FINDINGS• 65% of his subjects, ordinary residents of New Haven, were willing to give apparently

harmful electric shocks-up to 450 volts-to a pitifully protesting victim, simply because a scientific authority commanded them to, and in spite of the fact that the victim did not do anything to deserve such punishment.

A substantial proportion of people do what they are told to do, irrespective of the content of the act and without limitations of conscience, so long as they perceive that the command comes from a legitimate authority….. This is, perhaps the most fundamental lesson of our study: ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process.

Stanley Milgram, 1974.

WHY DID SO MANY PEOPLE OBEY THE AUTHORITY FIGURE?• Experience has taught us that authorities are generally trustworthy and legitimate and

obedience to them is often appropriate.

• The orders given moved gradually from reasonable to unreasonable – this made it difficult for the participant to notice the point at which they became unreasonable.

• The participants were acting as ‘agents’ in which they had become instruments of an authority figure and so ceased to act according to their conscience.

FACTORS AFFECTING OBEDIENCEBy varying the experimental conditions Milgram discovered several factors that affect

obedience:

• Proximity of victim to the participant

• Proximity to the experimenter also affected the decision to obey – the closer the experimenter was to the participant the more likely they were to obey.

• Conversely gender had little effect on obdience in Milgram’s studies.

ETHICS OF MILGRAM’S STUDY• Was it ethical to deceive participants in this way and cause them psychological stress?

• Could we possibly know what we know had Milgram not performed his experiments?

CONFORMITYYielding to group pressures in the absence of a direct request or order

• Regulates the behaviour among those of equal status.

• Emphasis is on acceptance.

• Behaviour adopted is similar to that of peers.

• Requirement of going along with the group is often implicit.

• Participants often deny conformity as an explanation of their behaviour.

• Occurs within a hierarchy. Individual feels that the person above has the right to prescribe behaviour.

• Links one status to another.

• Emphasis on power.

• Behaviour adopted differs from that of authority figure.

• Request/demand for action is explicit.

• Participants embrace obedience as an explanation for their behaviour.

DIFFERENCES BETWEEN OBEDIENCE AND CONFORMITY

OBEDIENCE CONFORMITY

CONFORMITY• Changing attitudes or behaviour to accommodate the standards of groups or peers.

ASCH’S CLASSIC STUDY ON CONFORMITY

• Asch assembled groups of 7-9 university students and told them that they were participating in a study on visual judgement. All but one were confederates and their answers were planned in advance

• When asked to match the lines participants answered incorrectly <1% of the time

When confederate group chose a different line, participants made the same incorrect choice as the group 36.8% of the time.

Participants only conformed if all confederates agreed. If any one of them dissented the participants followed their own judgement most of the time.

Asch’s study showed how powerful goup processes can be.

• Personality and self esteem affected the tendency for individuals to conform.

• Conformity varies between and within cultures and tends to reflect economic and ecological demands.

KELMAN - CONFORMITY• According to Kelman (1958) there are three types of conformity:

• Compliance

• Internalisation

• Identification

• Compliance: you go along with the crowd and publicly agree with them. However, internally you maintain your original views. Paraphrasing kelman, conformity occurs to gain specific reward or approval or to avoid punishment or disapproval.

• Internalisation: occurs when people take on the views of others both publicly and privately. According to kelman the person adopts the induced behaviour because it is consistent with their own value system.

• Identification: occurs when a person conforms to the role that society expects them to play. As with compliance there does not have to be change in private opinion. The classic example here obviously is Zimbardo

PEOPLE MIGHT CONFORM BECAUSE OF:

Informational influence

Why conform? Because you believe in the superior

knowledge or judgment of others

This leads people to change their private opinion.

Normative influence

Why conform? Because you want to be liked or respected

by other members of the group

This does not lead people to change their private opinion.

ZIMBARDO’S PRISON EXPERIMENTShowed how powerful the demands of roles and situations can be on individual behaviour.http://www.prisonexp.org/

http://www.prisonexp.org/psychology/1

• De-individution

• Diffusion of responsibility

• A group is a collection of people whose actions affect the other group members.

• All groups develop norms, or standards for behaviour.

• People also frequently play roles within groups

• Roles can have dramatic influence on behaviour e.g. Zimbardo’s prison experiment

• Decisions made by a group tend to be either conservative or risky. This is known as group polarisation.

• Group decisions may also reflect group cohesiveness, whereby people tend to cluster together to be viewed more favourable by the ingroup.

• Group-think occurs when members of a group make decisions on based on maintaining group harmony and cohesiveness rather than on a critical analysis of the realities of a situation.

• Group think is common in situations with a charismatic leader or in situations in which groups are under extreme stress.

GROUP PROCESSESTo what extent does our behaviour depend on the groups of which we are a part?

• The presence or absence of other people can enhance or inhibit performance – social facilitation.

• Social loafing – the process by which people may exert less effort when in a group.

Leadership style is the manner and approach of providing direction, implementing plans, and motivating people.

LEADERSHIP STYLES

LEADERSHIP STYLE STUDY – LEWIN (199)• 10 year old boys were allocated to one of three groups for after-school craft activities.

Each group had an adult with a different leadership style;

• Autocratic

• Democratic

• Laissez-faire (permissive)

AUTOCRATIC, DEMOCRATIC OR LAISSEZ-FAIRE?

• Although good leaders use all three styles, with one of them normally dominant, bad leaders tend to stick with one style.

• http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/leader/leadstl.html

• Autocratic leader- boys produced more crafts but crafts were of lower quality than democratic group and boys were more likely to stray from task when the leader left the room

• Democratic leader – boys expressed greater satisfaction and less aggression than the other groups.

• Laissez faire led to neither satisfaction nor output.

LEWIN’S LEADERSHIP CATEGORIES PARALLEL BAUMRIND’S FINDINGS ON PARENTING STYLES

The 4th parenting style was added later

http://www.positive-parenting-ally.com/3-parenting-styles.html

• Task leader

• Social-emotional leaders