Question

Topic 3:

1a). Describe how social psychologists have studied conformity in the laboratory. Explain what their findings reveal about the potency of social forces and the nature of evil. Be sure to explain Sherif's studies of norms formation; Asch's studies of group pressure and Milgram's obedience studies.

2a). What is conformity? Identify situations that trigger much - and little - conformity. 2b). Discuss the concepts of reactanceand asserting uniqueness.

3a). Identify and explain the central route of persuasion and the peripheral route. 3b). Describe how the factors that compose persuasion affect the likelihood that we will take either the central or the peripheral route to persuasion.

4a). Can persuasion be resisted? Explain your rationale. 4b).  Identify some tactics for resisting influence. How might we prepare people to resist unwanted persuasion?

5a). Explain how we are impacted by the presence of others. 5b). Does the presence of observers always arouse people? Explain your response. 5c). What factors would lead us to be aroused in the presence of others - explain each factor.

6a). What is social loafing? 6b). How does social loafing occur in everyday life? Provide examples from your own experience to support research.

7a). Define and explain deindividuation and identify circumstances that trigger it.  

8a). What is group polarization? 8b). Provide examples of group polarization in schools, in communities, on the Internet and in terrorist organizations. 8b).  Describe when and why group influences often hinder good decisions. Describe also when groups promote good decisions and how we can lead groups to make optimal decisions. Be sure to discuss impacts of groupthink.

Answer 1

1. Muzafer Sherif conducted a classic study on conformity in 1936. Sherif put subjects in a dark room and told them to watch a pinpoint of light and report how far it moved. Psychologists had previously discovered that a small, unmoving light in a dark room often appeared to be moving. This was labeled the autokinetic effect. The autokinetic effect is an illusion because the light does not actually move. However, people almost always believe that it does. Realizing that an experience that is completely "in people's heads" might be readily influenced by suggestion, Sherif decided to study how people were influenced by other people's opinions, in their perception of the autokinetic effect. First Sherif studied how subjects reacted to the autokinetic effect when they were in a room by themselves. He found that they soon established their own individual norms for the judgment—usually 2 to 6 inches. In other words, when given many opportunities (trials) to judge the movement of the light, they settled on a distance of 2-6 inches and became consistent in making this judgment from trial to trial. In the next phase of the experiment, groups of subjects were put in the dark room, 2 or 3 at a time, and asked to agree on a judgment. Now Sherif noted a tendency to compromise. People who usually made an estimate like 6 inches soon made smaller judgments like 4 inches. Those who saw less movement, such as 2 inches, soon increased their judgments to about 4 inches. People changed to more resemble the others in the group. Sherif's subjects were not aware of this social influence. When Sherif asked subjects directly, "Were you influenced by the judgments of other persons during the experiments," most denied it. However, when subjects were tested one at a time, later, most now conformed to the group judgment they recently made. A subject who previously settled on an estimate of 2 inches or 6 inches was more likely (after the group experience) to say the light was moving about 4 inches. These subjects had been changed by the group experience, whether they realized it or not. They had increased their conformity to group norms. Group norms are agreed-upon standards of behavior. Sherif's experiment showed group norms are established through interaction of individuals and the leveling-off of extreme opinions. The result is a consensus agreement that tends to be a compromise...even if it is wrong.

Asch believed that the main problem with Sherif's (1935) conformityexperiment was that there was no correct answer to the ambiguous autokinetic experiment. How could we be sure that a person conformed when there was no correct answer? Asch (1951) devised what is now regarded as a classic experiment in social psychology, whereby there was an obvious answer to a line judgment task. If the participant gave an incorrect answer it would be clear that this was due to group pressure. Aim: Solomon Asch (1951) conducted an experiment to investigate the extent to which social pressure from a majority group could affect a person to conform. Procedure: Asch used a lab experiment to study conformity, whereby 50 male students from Swarthmore College in the USA participated in a ‘vision test.’ Using a line judgment task, Asch put a naive participant in a room with seven confederates. The confederates had agreed in advance what their responses would be when presented with the line task. The real participant did not know this and was led to believe that the other seven participants were also real participants like themselves. Each person in the room had to state aloud which comparison line (A, B or C) was most like the target line. The answer was always obvious. The real participant sat at the end of the row and gave his or her answer last. There were 18 trials in total, and the confederates gave the wrong answer on 12 trails (called the critical trials). Asch was interested to see if the real participant would conform to the majority view. Asch's experiment also had a control condition where there were no confederates, only a "real participant." Results: Asch measured the number of times each participant conformed to the majority view. On average, about one third (32%) of the participants who were placed in this situation went along and conformed with the clearly incorrect majority on the critical trials. Over the 12 critical trials, about 75% of participants conformed at least once, and 25% of participant never conformed. In the control group, with no pressure to conform to confederates, less than 1% of participants gave the wrong answer.

Milgram (1963) was interested in researching how far people would go in obeying an instruction if it involved harming another person. Stanley Milgram was interested in how easily ordinary people could be influenced into committing atrocities, for example, Germans in WWII. Procedure: Volunteers were recruited for a lab experiment investigating “learning” (re: ethics: deception). Participants were 40 males, aged between 20 and 50, whose jobs ranged from unskilled to professional, from the New Haven area. They were paid $4.50 for just turning up. At the beginning of the experiment, they were introduced to another participant, who was a confederate of the experimenter (Milgram). They drew straws to determine their roles – learner or teacher – although this was fixed and the confederate was always the learner. There was also an “experimenter” dressed in a gray lab coat, played by an actor (not Milgram). Two rooms in the Yale Interaction Laboratory were used - one for the learner (with an electric chair) and another for the teacher and experimenter with an electric shock generator. The “learner” (Mr. Wallace) was strapped to a chair with electrodes. After he has learned a list of word pairs given him to learn, the "teacher" tests him by naming a word and asking the learner to recall its partner/pair from a list of four possible choices. The teacher is told to administer an electric shock every time the learner makes a mistake, increasing the level of shock each time. There were 30 switches on the shock generator marked from 15 volts (slight shock) to 450 (danger – severe shock). The learner gave mainly wrong answers (on purpose), and for each of these, the teacher gave him an electric shock. When the teacher refused to administer a shock, the experimenter was to give a series of orders/prods to ensure they continued. There were four prods and if one was not obeyed, then the experimenter (Mr. Williams) read out the next prod, and so on. Results:65% (two-thirds) of participants (i.e., teachers) continued to the highest level of 450 volts. All the participants continued to 300 volts. Milgram did more than one experiment – he carried out 18 variations of his study. All he did was alter the situation (IV) to see how this affected obedience (DV).

2. Conformity is a type of social influence involving a change in belief or behavior in order to fit in with a group. This change is in response to real (involving the physical presence of others) or imagined (involving the pressure of social norms / expectations) group pressure. Conformity can also be simply defined as “yielding to group pressures” (Crutchfield, 1955). Group pressure may take different forms, for example bullying, persuasion, teasing, criticism, etc. Conformity is also known as majority influence (or group pressure). The term conformity is often used to indicate an agreement to the majority position, brought about either by a desire to ‘fit in’ or be liked (normative) or because of a desire to be correct (informational), or simply to conform to a social role (identification).

3. Central Route

When motivated and able to do so, people tend to carefully analyze information presented to them, scrutinizing the perceived central merits of the arguments in light of preexisting knowledge. Importantly, this increased thinking does not automatically lead to increased persuasion. An argument (or piece of evidence) is only persuasive if it prompts favorable thoughts in the receiver. An argument can be detrimental to the persuasion attempt if it is judged to be inaccurate or elicits mostly negative reactions such as counterarguments. Helen, from the opening example, was impressed by the arguments, so the advertisement had a positive effect on her evaluation of the candidate. Had she been unimpressed, however, she would have produced negative thoughts about the candidate, resulting in resistance to the appeal. Under the central route, the degree of attitude change depends on the valence of the thoughts produced in response to the message (favorable or unfavorable), the amount of them, and how confident people are in their thoughts. The more favorable thoughts produced that are held with confidence, the more persuasion. Because the central route relies on the perceived rather than the actual quality of an argument’s central merits, its persuasiveness can vary from person to person. Furthermore, it means that high thinking does not necessarily equate to objectivity or rationality in processing—the careful processing may be objective, or it may be biased (e.g., by one’s prior opinion). That is, people who hold strong attitudes against a candidate may focus on finding flaws in the message and downplay positive aspects of the candidate.

Peripheral Route

Because people cannot devote their full attention to each and every message to which they are exposed, they often rely instead on simple heuristics or peripheralcues, including the expertise or attractiveness of the speaker or their own current mood (e.g., “I enjoyed myself at that rally, so I must really like that candidate.”). There are a number of relatively simple cues available in the political context that can trigger favorable evaluations in the absence of much thinking. The most obvious example is political party. Other strong cues include the likability, similarity, and trust heuristics, which involve voting for somebody because they appear likable, similar to oneself, or trustworthy despite not knowing much about the candidate’s policies. Indeed, the mere perceived trustworthiness of a candidate’s face has been shown to predict election outcomes. Although simple cues such as likability and trust often produce change when people are not thinking much via the peripheral route, as will be discussed shortly, these same simple cues can also influence attitudes via the central route.