INTRODUCTION TO

PSYCHOLOGY

Chapter 13
Social Influences and
Relationships
At the end of this Chapter you
should be able to:

 Understand Social Influence

 Learn about Conformity

 Learn about Obedience

 Learn about Compliance

 Learn about Group Dynamics

Social Influence

 Three broad types of influence comprise the

focus:

– Conformity

– Obedience

– Compliance
Social Influence:
Conformity -- Classic experiments

M. Sherif (1937): Individuals asked to view a

stationary light
- Task: estimate how far the light had moved
when viewed in a darkened room
- (The light had not moved at all)
- Sometimes performed the task alone,
sometimes with others in the room
- Estimates varied according to # of people in the
room, and whether confederates gave high/low
estimates
Conformity, cont’d..

S. Asch (1951): Individuals given a card with a

vertical line printed on it
- Participants asked to then look at another card
with three lines on it: two did not match, one
did
- Task: select line that matched the length of
the line on the original card; correct answer
was clear
- Individuals often chose a clearly wrong option
if confederates first chose a wrong option
These people are This is the
actors – told to participant: he
choose the wrong doesn’t know the
answers other people are
part of the
experiment.
Asch’s experiment cont’d..

• By the end of the experiment, most people agree

with the group (even though its very easy to see that
the answer is wrong).
• The pressure to conform (agree) to what other
people say (do) must be very strong, because the
correct answer is so easy to see.
Conformity

 Results indicate that we often conform: why?

 Two influences: informational and normative
– Informational: We seek others’ opinions on what
is correct if we suspect they might know better
than we do
– Normative: We want to fit in, be liked, avoid
looking foolish
Minority Influence

 Unanimous majority influences us

powerfully
 Yet: one person’s dissent can break the
hold of the majority
– Appears not to stem from creation of an
‘alliance’ – occurred even when
dissenter also chose an incorrect
response, as long as it differed from
that chosen by the majority
Factors that affect Social
Conformity

Size of Group: Conformity tends to increase

as the size of the group increases. But there
is little change in conformity once the group
size reaches 4-5.

Anonymity (i.e. secrecy): When participants

could write their answers down rather than
announce them in public, conformity
dropped.
Factors that affect Social
Conformity

Ambiguity (i.e. uncertainty) / Difficulty of Task:

When the (comparison) lines (e.g. A, B, C) were
made more similar in length it was harder to judge
the correct answer and conformity increased. The
more difficult the task the greater the conformity.

Status and Knowledge: If someone is of high

status (e.g. your boss) or has a lot of knowledge
(e.g. your teacher), they might be more influential,
and so people will conform to their opinions more.
The higher the status the higher the conformity
Social influence: Obedience

 Some obedience obviously necessary for life

in a complex society
 But: Why do we obey commands that result
in atrocities – Nazi death camps, Khmer
Rouge massacres, Soviet “purges”, etc.?
 Two possible sources of obedience:
dispositional trait of obedience and
situational aspects
Personality and Obedience

 Authoritarian personality: beliefs about

power, obedience, and importance of strong
leadership
 More investigations since the 50s and 60s
have focused on related fears/ beliefs /
attitudes:
– Need for order or structure
– Intolerance of ambiguity
– Concern with death and societal instability
Situations and obedience
Hannah Arendt, in writing about the trial of
Adolf Eichmann, who engineered the death
and execution of 6 million Jews and
other minorities in the Nazi death camps:

“The trouble with Eichmann was precisely

that so many were like him… terribly and
terrifyingly normal.”
In other words …

 The situation was the prime variable to

investigate
 What aspects of the situation are salient in
driving this kind of obedience? How coercive
need it be?
– Milgram’s experiments: sought to answer
these questions
– Series of experiments run that have
influenced decades of thought and follow-
up studies
Milgram’s experiments

 Participants: told they would be delivering shocks in

a learning experiment
– No shocks were ever actually delivered:
confederates were actors
– Shock level: dials labeled mild to deadly: 15 to
450+ mv
 “Teacher” (participant) and “Learner” (confederate)
separated into 2 cubicles, but could hear each other
 “Teacher” instructed to shock “learner” in increasing
amounts of voltage, whenever learner made a
mistake
This is the
participant,
the person
we are
interested
in– what
will he/she
do?
Milgram’s experiments cont’d..

Method: 40 males aged 20-50 were found to take

part (through a newspaper advertisement), and paid
$4.50 to participate in a study regarding 'memory'.

Participants were introduced to a man called, Mr.

Wallace. Mr. Wallace was tied into a chair with
electrodes on his hands.

The participant was taken to another room and told

to ask the Mr. Wallace questions (using a telephone).
Milgram’s experiments cont’d..
Each incorrect answer was punished with an electric
shock (given by the participant), beginning at 15 volts
(very mild), going up by 15 volts for every incorrect
answer up to 450 volts (danger - severe shock, xxx).
Mr. Wallace said he had a mild heart condition.

Shocks were received in silence up until 300 volts.

Then Mr. Wallace complained of having heart trouble
and hit on the door and asked to be let out. He then
refused to answer any more questions. After a short
while he became silent: maybe unconscious or
perhaps dead.
Milgram’s experiments cont’d..

If the participant questioned the experimenter, they

were told four things:

1. Please continue,
2. The experiment requires you to continue,
3. It is essential that you continue,
4. You have no choice, you must continue.

If the participant still refused to give any more

shocks, they were allowed to stop.
Milgram’s experiments -Result

No one actually stopped below the level

of intense shock.

22.5% stopped at 315v (extremely

intense).

65% continued up until the maximum

shock of 450v.
Milgram’s experiments -Result

BUT…
Participants showed signs of extreme tension in
experiment
(biting fingernails, sweating, trembling, stuttering,
groaning: three participants actually had full
blown seizures)
During debriefing the participants completed a follow
up questionnaire.
84% of them felt glad that they participated, 74%
learnt something of personal importance.
Milgram’s experiments -Result

 Profound ethical questions:

– Under what conditions can you cause
someone to believe that they have
behaved in this way?
– Is it ethical to do this to someone? (Self-
knowledge, stress, etc.)
– Does the gain from doing the experiment
outweigh the distress caused to the
participants (the teachers)?
Stanford Prison Experiment,
by Philip Zimbardo and colleagues
Compliance

 Norm of reciprocity: we feel compelled to comply

when someone has helped us in the past
 2 related techniques:
– “Door in the face” technique: If a large request is
followed up by a smaller request, compliance with
request increases dramatically: “You conceded,
now I have to concede”
– “That’s-not-all” technique: “freebie” offered after
initial offer tendered, and price seems more
reasonable than if both were initially included in
the offer
Group Dynamics

 Study of mutual influences of individuals and

groups on each other
 Behaving in groups:
– Social facilitation: “mere presence” effect:
we compete harder when others are
nearby
– Social inhibition: the opposite effect – we
sometimes perform more poorly when
others are near
Social Loafing

 What if no one is the “audience,” and

therefore all must perform?
– Ringelmann (1913): in a group of men,
each pulled less hard than if pulling solo
– Latane (1981): “social loafing”
 People work less hard in groups
 Consistent across cultures, across
many variables
Deindividuation

 Sometimes: others’ presence drastically

changes our behaviors
– Riots, lynch mobs, etc.: behavior can become
disinhibited, cruel, vicious
– Deindividuation: we lose awareness of
ourselves as individuals, feel less responsible
for our behavior
– Role we play: may obscure our individuality
as well
Thinking in Groups

 Group polarization:
– Groups decisions are more extreme than
those we make on our own

 “Risky shift”
– Greater willingness for a group to take
risks than when we are acting as
individuals
Helping and Altruism

 How do social environments influence helping

behavior?
 “The Bystander Effect”
– Our understanding of the situation influences
our decisions on acting or not acting
– Pluralistic ignorance: if others are not doing
anything, probably nothing needs to be done
 Problem: others are using the same
reasoning…
The Bystander Effect
and the murder of Kitty Genovese

 Kitty Genovese: murdered on a public

street (1964)
– Attack lasted over an hour
– Witnessed by more than 35 people (from upstairs
windows overlooking the street)
– Not a single person helped, not a single person
called the police
– Why?
The Bystander Effect

 Diffusion of responsibility: we feel less

compelled because we feel less responsible
 Each bystander feels increasingly less
responsible if there are many bystanders
 We weigh the costs of helping as well as the
benefits:
– Physical danger weighed as well as
psychological cost – i.e., being late if one
stops to help