Social influence, its concepts and ethics

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Tara Rees

Social influence, its concepts and ethics.

What is social influence? It shows up in many different formats, for example there is Audience effects where a person may alter their behaviour due to someone watching them, then there is Co-action effects where sometimes a person will alter their behaviour when they are with different people, for example if you’re a mother and a teacher, you would act differently with the two different types of people that you would deal with. One of the first people to look at social influence was Norman Triplett (1898) he did a study in which he had children one a time wind up a fishing reel and timed them, he then brought in more children to the same room and did the same again and timed them once again, he found that children were faster when there was other children around than on their own, to ensure the data was correct he even had them repeat it on their own afterwards. There was debate over if this was just competiveness or the effects of having the other children around making them want to be better.

There is also social facilitation, which is where a task would be made easier if there are more people around; this is shown during Triplett’s study with the children and the fishing reels. Social loafing is the tendency for people to perform worse on simple tasks, yet better at complex tasks when they are in the presence of others. In other word, social loafing has been formally defined as the tendency for people to expend less effort on a given task when working in groups than when working alone. Social loafing appears to be a direct contradiction to Social Facilitation, but can be explained by the differing circumstances in which it occurs. In particular, when we are working in a group, it can be easier to hide laziness when working in a group of people who are working together. The key here is that the loafer is not worried about being evaluated.

Social inhibition is when in a group situation that a person wants to be seen as normal within the group.

Crowd theory, this is mainly based on ‘mob psychology’ when you become part of a crowd you go through a process of deinviduation where you become a faceless member of the group

Roles in society also can dictate on what we do, for example we know that red light means to stop and this is because this is the law, and we have to obey the law or face the consequences. This goes into what we then conform to and that which we agree with and what we don’t. Also we all have roles in our day to day lives and we do things in certain roles that we may not do in others, for example you may be a mother and a teacher, and the way that you would speak to a student would not necessarily be the way you would talk to your own child.  

Conforming there are two main types of conforming, which were developed by Kelman (1958) the first type is Compliance this is where people yield to group pressure in order to avoid ‘punishment’ for not conforming. So publicly a person would agree with what is being said or done but privately disagrees. For example during Asch’s (1951) experiments he gave subjects a simple perception test by matching a standard line with another but they were presented on different cards, the subject then had to say either A, B or C, matched the standard line. A group of 12 subjects were tested individually and made only 3 mistakes when tested about 20 times each. Then he tried it a different way he then tested groups of seven to nine in which only was person was real and the others were in on what was happening and had been instructed to give the same wrong answers. Once this had been tested they spoke to the real subject and they admitted that even though they were sure that they were correct that they were influenced in their answers by the rest of the group. Kelman also said there was another type of conformity Internalisation where an individual’s opinion comes to resemble the groups and then they both coincide so that there is no difference between them and then no conflict. This was the case with Sherif’s subjects who when tested individually after being in the group gave estimates that were closer to the group estimates.

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Obedience tends to be singular where as conformity is usually in groups, like a child would obey a parent and students would conform to school rules.        

I am now going to look at two studies that have been completed and on the basis of social influence I am going to look at Milgrams (1963) famous electric shock experiment and also Zimbardo’s Prison Study

Milgrams study was about obedience to authority unlike many other studies done in the same context this one differs, in this one the people were given an order or instructions to carry out they were then expected ...

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