HPS204 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Minority Influence, Optical Illusion, Social Proof
HPS204 WEEK 8
Social Influence
Define the terms ‘compliance’, ‘conformity’ and ‘obedience’;
Social influence is the process whereby attitudes and behaviour ae influenced by the real or
implied presence of other people. Norms are attitudinal and behavioural uniformities that
define group membership and differentiate between groups. Social influence influences
how people construct norms, how they are regulated, and how they change. Vaughan and
Hogg define compliance as superficial, public and transitory change in behaviour and
expressed attitudes in response to requests, coercion, or group pressure.
Obedience refers to the compliance with an order, request, law, or submission to another’s
authority. This was explored in Milgram’s experiments.
Conformity is the deep-seated, private and enduring change in behaviour and attitudes due
to group pressure. Sherif (1936) linked this to norms: he argued that people use the
behaviours of others to establish the range of possible behaviour, i.e. frames of reference.
Asch argued that if the object of judgement was entirely unambiguous, i.e. there was an
obviously correct answer, then disagreement, or alternative perceptions, would have no
effect on behaviour. This was tested in his classic experiment, described below. Individual
effects on conformity include low self-esteem, high anxiety, feelings of self-blame and
insecurity in the group, and a generally authoritarian personality. Situational factors include
group size (conformity increased with group size up until a certain point), and group
unanimity (if erroneous majority was unanimous, conformity is higher). The informational
influence refers to an influence to accept information from another as evidence about
reality, such as in Sherif’s study, and the normative influence refers to an influence to
conform with the positive expectation of others, to gain social approval or to avoid social
disapproval, such as in Asch’s study. This feeds into the dual-dependency model, which
maintains that people are influenced by others because they are dependent on them either
for information that removes ambiguity and thus establishes subjective validity, or for
reasons of social approval and acceptance. Self- categorisation relates to conformity in that
when in a group, we assimilate our thoughts, feelings, and behaviour to the group norm,
and act accordingly. Referent informational influence is the pressure to conform with a
group norm that defines oneself as a group member. People in this manner conform
because they are group members, not to validate themselves or reality. People are
conforming to a norm, not another person.
Describe the classic studies on social influence (Milgram, Asch, Sherif);
Milgram’s most classical study involved electric shocking. The teacher, which was a
participant, had to shock the learner, who was actually a confederate, with increasingly high
volt shocks every time they made a mistake in learning pairs of words. Despite objections
from the confederate, most participants continued to give increasingly more painful shocks,
even when the learner was no longer responsive. Whilst the shocks were fake, the teacher
did not know this during the experiment. The ethical issues raised by Milgram’s study
included that the research may not have been important enough to induce that much
stress, the participants were not feeling free to leave at any time, and although the
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Document Summary
Social influence is the process whereby attitudes and behaviour ae influenced by the real or implied presence of other people. Norms are attitudinal and behavioural uniformities that define group membership and differentiate between groups. Social influence influences how people construct norms, how they are regulated, and how they change. Hogg define compliance as superficial, public and transitory change in behaviour and expressed attitudes in response to requests, coercion, or group pressure. Obedience refers to the compliance with an order, request, law, or submission to another"s authority. Conformity is the deep-seated, private and enduring change in behaviour and attitudes due to group pressure. Sherif (1936) linked this to norms: he argued that people use the behaviours of others to establish the range of possible behaviour, i. e. frames of reference. Asch argued that if the object of judgement was entirely unambiguous, i. e. there was an obviously correct answer, then disagreement, or alternative perceptions, would have no effect on behaviour.
