Exemplar-answers 12-marks conformity PDF

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Outline and ev evaluate aluate explanations of conf conformity ormity ormity.. (12 marks) Normative social influence says people conform because they feel they need to be accepted and belong to the group. They accept the majorities’ views publicly, but privately they disagree – this type of conformity is compliance. The majority control the other group members, and use the fear of rejection to get others to conform. This is because humans are a social species and need companionship and are afraid of rejection. Research to support this explanation comes from Asch’s experiment, where participants knew the group was wrong privately but chose to conform in order to be accepted. This suggests that normative social influence is a valid theory of why people conform as it states we conform to be part of a social group, not because they believe the group to be right. On the other hand, in real life they aren’t part of that social group so don’t fear rejection, so factors other than the group may influence conformity. Another explanation of why people conform is informational social influence, where the individual changes their opinion both publicly and privately, which is described as internalisation. They do this as they believe the group are right. Conformity tends to increase when the situation is ambiguous, in matters of crisis or if they feel others are better qualified to make decisions. Fein et al found that participant’s opinions of political candidates in a debate were influenced by the reaction of other participants. They observed the views of others, and changed their opinions accordingly, which supports the idea that informational social influence plays a role in influencing people if they’re unsure about what they believe. Sherif’s research also supports this theory as he found that the main reason people followed the majority was because they wanted to use the group for information as they genuinely believed them to be right. This shows that the theory of informational social influence is a valid theory of why people conform as individuals follow the group because they internalise the attitudes and behaviours of that group. A final explanation is social impact theory, which claims that majority influence can be divided into people who are sources or targets. The amount of influence depends on: Numbers – as the number of people increases, so does the majorities’ influence, until it reaches four people. Strength – the more important the people in the group are perceived to be by the target, the more influence they have on that individual. Immediacy – the closer the source, either psychologically, physically or socially, the more influence they have on the individual. Hart et al conducted a study where participants had to rate applicants to a university, and found that participants were most influenced by immediacy as they were more influenced when the confederate was closer in distance. Participants were more influenced by an expert confederate, but only when they were further away, which suggests immediacy does affect conformity.

Outline and ev evaluate aluate researc research h studies into conformit conformity y. (12 marks) A research done in conformity was conducted by Sherif. He did a lab experiment where he asked participants to watch a non-moving light in a dark room. The light appeared to move when in fact it was a visual illusion. Participants were asked to estimate the movement of the light alone and then in groups of three. He found that when participants were asked to estimate the movement of the light alone there was a variation in answers. However, when they were in groups of three participants changed their answers to give an average of their individual estimates. A criticism of Sherif’s study is that its low in ecological validity, for example the task that participants were asked to do is not a task you would do in everyday life. Therefore we may not be able to generalise these results to real life situations in which people conform to a majority. Another criticism of Sherif’s study is that it raises ethical issues, for example participants were deceived as they were not told the truth about the light not moving. Therefore this can lead to the participants feeling stressed as they try to find out the answer. This would raise another ethical issue as Sherif has not protected his participants from harm therefore this shows that Sherif is valuing his experiment more than his participants. Another criticism to Sherif’s study is that the answer to the task is ambiguous; for example, we don’t know whether the participants conformed to others due to them generally being affected by others answers or whether it was due to there being no correct answer. Therefore no clear conclusion has been made so it may be difficult to generalise the findings to the rest of the research population An advantage of Sherif’s study is that he has a standardised procedure which means the study would be easy to replicate therefore making it high in reliability. His study also triggered research into investigating majority influences. Another piece of research done into conformity was conducted by Asch. He had 123 undergraduate Sociology American students. They were shown two cards and asked to match the standard line with the comparison line of the same length. They were also joined by 7 to 9 confederates. In the study the Participants were shown different lines 18 times and the confederates gave wrong answers 2/3 of the time. Asch found that when the confederate gave the right answers the participants made no wrong errors, however when the confederates gave the wrong answers the participants went along with them 37% of the time. He found that 5% of the participants conformed on every trial. 75% of participants conformed on at least one trial. A disadvantage of Asch’s study is that the high levels of conformity reflect the norms of American society at the times. During 1950’s the cold war was going on in the US, so people didn’t want to appear different as this was frowned upon. This was supported by Perrin & Spencer as he did a similar study to Asch and found virtually no conformity in British engineering students. This suggests that social climate

changes as in the 80’s they did less to encourage conformity. However, Perrin & Spencer have been criticised as they have only used engineering students as their participants so they are more likely to make exact measurements and therefore less susceptible to social influences in these circumstances. Another criticism of Asch’s study is that his experiment raises ethical issues. Although participants were not physically harmed participants did feel mislead and this may have annoyed or upset them. Therefore participants may have felt pressured in a certain way. It could be argued that they have been psychologically harmed in some way. This was supported by Bogdonoff et al who did a study similar to Asch’s and found a raised blood pressure and increased heart rate within participants. Asch’s study also involved a level of deception due to this participants were not able to give informed consent...