revision cards for aqa psych paper 1 social influence topic. please excuse spelling or grammar mistakes! made entirely by me using the standard year 1 textbook, for reference i achieved an a* :)

1. Types and Explanations
 Internalisation: genuine acceptance of group norms, present both in public and
private, permanent attitude alteration
 Identification: temporary acceptance, public and private, usually to be a part of a
group
 Compliance: public-only acceptance of group norms, very superficial and
temporary change
 Informational Social Influence (ISI): agreeance with the majority opinion out of the
desire to be correct or a need to have the correct information, believing the
majority is most likely right; most likely to happen in new situations or ambiguous
situations
 Normative Social Influence (NSI): agreeance with the majority opinion out of the
desire to be liked or viewed as ‘normal’, emotional rather than cognitive; most
likely to happen in situations with strangers or where emotional isolation is a
possibility

2. Types and Explanations - EVAL
 Research support for ISI - Lucas (2006) found greater conformity in incorrect
group answers to questions that were difficult, suggesting people conform when
they are unsure about an answer
 Individual differences in NSI - McGhee and Teevan (1967) suggested that certain
people are much more susceptible to NSI than others, nAffiliators who require
affiliations; suggests that NSI is not a blanket acceptable explanation and may
only affect certain people
 ISI and NSI work together - they are not separatable, because real life is not a
separated society; not always possible to tell whether an individual is being
affected by NSI or ISI
 Individual differences in ISI - students/those with higher educations may be less
susceptible to ISI
 Research support for NSI - Asch found his ppts went along with a wrong answer
because others did, suggesting a need for affiliation

3. Asch’s Research
 Asch (1951): tested conformity by asking ppts (123 male American students) to
match a line to another from a selection of correct and incorrect lengths; each ppt
was tested individually with a group of 6 to 8 confederates; confederates gave
right answers at first but after a few questions were instructed to give wrong
answers
 Findings: ppts gave the wrong answer 36.8% of the time, with 25% not
conforming on any of the trials; interviews conducted afterwards revealed they
conformed to avoid rejection
 Asch’s variations: group size – with three confederates conformity rose to 31.8%
but addition of additional confederates made little difference; unanimity –
introduction of a confederate who disagreed with others, conformity was reduced
by a quarter; task difficulty – comparison lines made more similar in length,
conformity increase

4. Asch’s Research - EVAL
 Temporal validity – Perrin and Spencer (1980) recreated Asch’s study with engineering
students and found very little conformity, suggesting Asch’s results were limited to a
time in which people were, on the whole, more conformist
 Artificial situation – ppts may have been subject to demand characteristics, knowing
that they were in a research study + with the task being relatively trivial and not
applicable to real life; suggests that the conclusions drawn may not be generalisable
 Limited application of findings – only men were tested, from an individualist culture, in
a time of peak conformity; suggesting Asch’s research needs to be replicated in other
cultures for its findings to be validated
 Findings only apply to certain situations – ppts had to answer out loud to a group of
strangers, this may have unwillingly increased conformity
 Ethical issues – ppts were not told that they were being tested with confederates

5. Zimbardo’s Research
 Procedure: mock prison in the basement of Stanford University with 24 students
randomly assigned to either ‘guard’ or ‘prisoner’ roles; prisoners were mock-
arrested, strip-searched and given a uniform/number; guards were told to keep
prisoners in line and could do anything short of physical harm, had complete
power over the prisoner’s daily routines
 Findings: had to be stopped at day 6 rather than intended 14 due to emotional
states of prisoners; prisoners had begun rebelling against guards’ harsh
treatments but the guards got extremely cruel and divisive with their punishments;
one prisoner released on the first day and two more on the fourth
 Conclusions: all conformed to their roles within the prison, even volunteers only
momentarily involved

6. Zimbardo’s Research – EVAL
 Control – this research was highly controlled and therefore has a certain degree of
validity as scientific research; ppts were randomly assigned roles for example
 Lack of realism – ppts may have been play-acting rather than genuinely conforming to
their roles, i.e. one guard claimed he had based his actions off of a tv-show prison
guard and was therefore acting disingenuinely; this suggests Zimbardo’s conclusions
are incorrect
 Role of dispositional influences – Zimbardo may have exaggerated the power of
situation and minimised personality factors; only a minority of guards behaved brutally
and this was emphasised
 Lack of research support – this experiment was replicated by the BBC but they found
that the prisoners took control and overran the guards; explained by social identity
theory that the guards failed to cultivate a shared identity that the prisoners had
 Ethical issues – due to the treatment of the prisoners, this study is highly unethical as it
posed psychological, emotional, and even physical dangers to its ppts; researchers
were too deep into roles as well and this did further harm

7. Milgram’s Research
 Procedure: 40 male ppts were invited for a study on ‘the role of punishment in
learning’, assigned to be teachers with a confederate (unknowingly to ppt) as a
student and another as an experimenter; ppts told to shock the student when they
got an answer wrong with increasing increments (15v to 450v) not knowing the
shocks were fake; experimenter gave one of 4 prods when ppt felt unsure
 Findings: no ppts stopped below 300v, 12.5% stopped at 300, 65% went on to the
450v; ppts showed signs of distress but still continued
 Before the study, Milgram had asked his students to estimate the amount they
thought would go to 450V- they had estimated no more than 3%

8. Milgram’s Research - EVAL
 Low internal validity – suggested that ppts knew the shocks weren’t real and acted
accordingly, a review of the debrief tapes confirmed that many expressed doubts about
the realness of the shocks
 However, Sheridan and King replicated this study with real shocks on a puppy, and
despite this 54% of males and 100% of females delivered what they thought was a fatal
shock
 Good external validity – central feature was the relationship between the experimenter
and the ppts, which accurately reflects authority relationships in real life; this suggests
the findings are applicable to more everyday scenarios
 Supporting replication – French TV show used a replication of Milgram’s research, 80%
of ppts delivered a maximum shock of 460V; this supports and confirms the findings of
Milgram’s original research
 Ethical issues – unethical in that the ppts were unaware that the shocks were fake and
that they were the only genuine participant, could have caused serious and lasting
psychological harm

9. Situational Variables
 Proximity: ppt and learner confederate were in the same room- obedience
dropped to 40% from baseline 65%; another variation had ppt put learner’s hand
onto electroshock plate- obedience dropped to 30%; if experimenter gave orders
by phone it dropped to 20.5%
 Location: study took place in a run-down office building rather than the
prestigious Yale university- obedience dropped to 47.5%
 Uniform: experimenter was played by ‘member of public’ (another confederate) in
casual clothing, producing the lowest obedience of all trials at 20%

10. Situational Variables - EVAL
 Research support – Bickman (9174) conducted a study where a confederate asked members of the
public to pick up littler, dressed as either a businessman/milkman/security guard; found that ppts
were twice as likely to obey security guard than any other, suggesting uniform does in fact have an
influence on obedience like Milgram suggested
 Lack of internal validity – thought that many of Milgram’s ppts may have worked out it was fake,
especially within the ‘member of public’ variable; it is unclear whether the results are genuine or
not
 Cross-cultural replications – Miranda et al (1981) found an obedience of 90% in Spanish students,
suggesting that Milgram’s findings are not limited to American males and have the capability to be
generalised
 However, it has been pointed out that the large majority of replications have taken place in
developed western countries and there is no credible proof of Milgram’s work being applicable to
a more diverse array of cultures
 Control of variables – Milgram was systematic in his alteration of variables, improving the internal
validity of the study
 Obedience alibi – these findings support a situational explanation of obedience, but it is
dangerous to apply this theory to real life scenarios such as in the justice system because it allows
perpetrators to escape accountability for their actions

11. Social-Psychological Factors of Obedience
 Agentic state: a mental state where we feel no personal responsibility for our behaviour
because we believe ourselves to be acting for an authority figure, freeing us from the
demands of our consciences + allowing us to obey even a destructive authority figure
 Autonomous state: opposite of the agentic state, when an individual is acting for
themselves and so takes full responsibility for their actions
 The shift from autonomy to agency is known as the agentic shift, occurring when
someone perceives another as a figure of authority
 Binding factors: aspects of a situation that allow a person to ignore or minimise the
damaging effect of their behaviour to reduce their moral strain
 Legitimacy of authority: an explanation for obedience which suggests that we are more
likely to obey people who we perceive to have authority over us, this authority is
justified (legitimate) by the individual’s position of power within a social hierarchy
 Problems can arise when we relinquish autonomy over events to an authoritative figure
we believe to be knowledgeable and they act in a destructive way

12. Social-Psychological Factors of Obedience
- EVAL
 Research support – when shown a film of Milgram’s study, students identified that
the experimenter was to blame for the harm to the learner, suggesting that they
recognised an agentic state in the ppts and went to the top of the hierarchy of
power for blame
 Limited explanation – agentic shift does not explain many of Milgram’s research
findings (e.g. why some did not obey) and cannot explain why some individuals
do not feel anxiety acting as an agent destructively, meaning it has limited
application
 Cultural differences – legitimacy of authority explains a large amount of cultural
differences in obedience, such as when Milgram’s study was replicated in Australia
and they found only 16% displayed full obedience, and German studies showed
85%; suggesting that how cultures are taught to perceive authority figures will
reflect their rates of obedience + so giving this explanation a higher rate of
validity and generalisability

13. Dispositional Explanations
 Authoritarian personality: a type of personality that is especially susceptible to obeying people in
authority; such individuals also tend to view those below them as ‘inferior’ and be dismissive of
them whilst being submissive to authority figures
 Adorno et al. (1950) developed the F Scale to test the levels of authoritarian personality within
2000 middle-class Americans, which asked an array of sliding-scale questions to gauge a person’s
political and social views
 Findings: people with higher ratings identified with ‘strong’ people and were contemptuous of the
‘weak’, as well as having very solidified black-and-white thinking in regards to certain groups, with
their schema being made up of very strong stereotypes- positive correlation between
authoritarianism and prejudice
 Authoritarian characteristics: highly conventional attitudes towards race, sex, and gender; believing
societal leaders require strong traditional values and are uncomfortable with uncertainty
 Origins: Adorno theorised that this personality comes from elements of conditional love in
childhood, where perceived failures are severely criticised; he also suggested expectations of
absolute loyalty and strict discipline to be additional factors in the development of an
authoritarian personality

14. Dispositional Explanations – EVAL
 Research support – Milgram and Elms (1966) conducted interviews with fully obedient ppts who
scored highly on the F-Scale, believing there to be a link
 However, the found link was only correlative, and it is impossible to truly discern if there is any
relation between obedience and authoritarian personality in a scientific way outside of qualitative
data
 Limited explanation – is not generalisable to large swathes of population as it is based on
individual personality, meaning that it cannot be temporally applied to contexts such as WW2 etc.,
diminishing its potential realism
 Political bias – Adorno’s F-Scale measured right-wing authoritarianism, but neglected the existence
of a left-wing authoritarian personality, meaning the explanation is not comprehensive as it only
focuses on one political area of authoritarian personality
 Methodological problems – every item is worded in the same ‘direction’ which leaves the danger
of acquiesce bias open, and it has other methodological flaws which make it highly scientifically
invalid
 Correlative – Adorno only found correlations within his variable relationships, but this does not
equal causation and it is incorrect to present findings that state such a thing

15. Resistance to Social influence
 Social support: the presence of people who resist pressure to conform or obey can
help others to do the same, acting as models to show others that resistance to social
influence is possible
 Conformity: Asch’s research demonstrates that the dissenter does not have to be
correct, but just dissenting to act as a model
 Obedience: Milgram’s study showed a drop to 10% from 65% when the ppt was joined
by a disobedient confederate
 Locus of Control: Rotter (1966) proposed the concept, which refers to the sense we
each have about what directs events in our lives; internals believe they are mostly
responsible for what happens to them (this is an internal locus of control) whereas
externals believe it is a matter of luck or fate (this is an external LOC)
 Locus of control is on a continuum/spectrum, no one is truly internal or external
 Those with internal LOCs are more likely to resist social influence because they believe
themselves to have more autonomy over their life events and actions; they also tend to
be more self-confident, more ambitious, have more intelligence and less need for
social approval

16. Resistance to Social Influence - EVAL
 Research support, conformity – Allen and Levine (1971) found conformity decreased when there
was one dissenter in an Asch replication, even working if dissenter wore very thick glasses and
confessed he had trouble with his vision (being in no position to judge line length); this suggests
that resistance enables an individual to be free of the group rather than just conforming to
another
 Research support, obedience – Gamson et al. (1982) found higher levels of resistance in their study
them Milgram, due to the fact that the ppts were in groups rather than individuals (88% rebelled);
suggests that peer support is linked to higher resistance
 Research support for LOC – Holland (1967) replicated Milgram’s baseline with tests to test ppts
LOC, and found that 37% of internals did not go to the highest level compared to 23% of
externals; this suggests that LOC does have a basis for being an explanation for resistance to social
influence
 Contradictory research – Twenge et al. (2004) meta-analysed American LOC studies, and found
that people have become more resistant to social influence but also more external, suggesting
that LOC is an incomplete or temporally invalid explanation
 Limited role of LOC – the role of LOC in resisting social influence may have been exaggerated, and
has very little influence in familiar situations (where social influence is most likely to occur)

17. Minority Influence
 Minority influence: a form of social influence in which a minority of people
persuade others to adopt their beliefs, attitudes or behaviours; leading to
internalisation or conversion, in which private attitudes are changed as well as
public behaviours
 Consistency: MI is more effective if the minority group’s views remain consistent
both over time and across the group itself
 Commitment: MI is more effective if the minority group shows commitment, most
often in the form of making personal sacrifices in the name of beliefs
 Flexibility: minority groups should be prepared to compromise with the majority in
order to convert more people to their beliefs, since rigid systems will scare those
with opposing beliefs off
 Snowball effect: over time, more and more people will join the minority group in a
steepening curve, and eventually the minority becomes the majority

18. Minority Influence - EVAL
 Research support for consistence – Moscovici et al.’s study shows that a consistent minority
opinion had a greater effect on others as opposed to an inconsistent one, and meta-analyses have
returned the same; suggests the usefulness of consistence
 Research support for depth of though – Martin et al. (2003) found that ppts were less likely to be
supportive of a conflicting viewpoint if they had heard from a majority group rather than a
minority group; suggests the minority group has greater processing effect
 Artificial tasks – most studies looking into minority effects use artificial tasks which decreases their
validity and their application to real-life scenarios
 Research support for internalisation – in a variation of Moscovici, ppts were allowed to write down
their answers privately, and private agreement with a minority view was greater than in the
baseline; suggests that internalisation is an effect from minority influence and that minority
agreement is not simply public
 Limited real-world applications – research studies are able to make a clear line between the
minority and majority views, but this is just not applicable to many real-life scenarios where
minority influence happens; and there are usually more differences between viewpoints than just
numerical value

19. Social Change
 Social change: this occurs when whole societies, rather than just individuals, adopt new attitudes,
beliefs, and ways of doing things. Examples include accepting that the Earth orbits the sun,
women’s suffrage, gay rights, and environmental issues
 Steps in how minority influence creates social change: drawing attention, consistency, deeper
processing, augmentation principle, snowball effect, social cryptomnesia
 Augmentation principle: the attributional tendency to assign greater importance to a particular
cause or rationale of behaviour if there are other factors present that would normally produce a
different outcome
 Social cryptomnesia: people have a memory that change has occurred in society but no memory
of when exactly or how it happens- the minority has become the accepted and mostly undisputed
majority
 Lessons from conformity: social campaigns often use normative social influence to convert
individuals to their cause, for example claiming that ‘everyone else already has this view’ and the
individual is ‘late to the party’
 Lessons from obedience: Zimbardo talked about the use of ‘gradual commitment’ in social change;
if people are willing to commit to smaller changes then eventually they will be more willing to
commit to bigger ones that change certain fundamentals in society e.g. racists accepting the
desegregation of buses to accepting minorities as equal citizens in Civil Rights America

20. Social Change – EVAL
 Research support for normative influences – Nolan et al. (2008) hung messages on doors in San Diego
telling residents that most others had already decreased their energy usage, with a control that just asked
residents to decrease energy usage with no reference to other’s behaviour; found that those with
messages using NSI had a significant decrease in energy usage suggesting the use of NSI in social
change
 Minority influence is only indirectly effective – change happens slowly when they happen at all, for
example changes to smoking attitudes and drink-driving took decades; this suggests that social influence
may play a more minor role in social change than thought
 Role of deeper processing – it is argued that minority and majority influence involve different cognitive
processes, however Mackie (1987) disagrees and suggests that majority influence can cause deeper
processing if an individual does not already share their views; this means that the central element in the
process of minority influenced has been challenged and questions the validity of Moscovici’s theory
 Barriers to social change – Bashir et al. (2013) found that majorities are less likely to change their opinion
if they do not want to be associated with the stereotypes of the minority group, suggesting minority
groups have to behave in a certain way in order for their social influence to have an effect
 Methodological issues – most explanations of social influence branch off of studies by Moscovici, Asch,
and Milgram, all of which were deeply flawed methodologically, suggesting that new, more scientific
breakthrough studies should be considered to be the basis of minority influence and social change
theories