in this video we're going to look at social impact theory which is an alternative theory to agency theory that explains obedience within the new specification of excel psychology now you need to be able to describe and evaluate social impact theory but also be prepared for a question that might ask you to compare social impact theory and agency theory as they're both theories or explanations of obedience also you may need to be able to apply social impact theory to a situation if you're given a scenario question on the exam social impact theory was suggested by biblitane in 1981 who suggested that were influenced by the actions of others and he wanted to see how these other people would impact upon us and obedience social impact theory is a model that conceives of influence from other people as being a result of social forces so these social forces act on individuals as much as physical forces can affect an object and it predicts that conformity or obedience will increase with increasing strength immediacy and number of the influence that a group has now retained suggests that people's actions affect and change how we feel and this response will have a change within conformity obedience and he also uses this to explain the bystander effect now this is the most important slide that you're going to be shown the likelihood that a person will increase will respond to social influence will increase with strength immediacy and number latan actually puts this in a mathematical formula which is f equals s i n now s times i times n will obviously give a greater value so the higher those numbers are the higher the impact on their obedience levels so the strength of the group so how important the person or the group who are trying to influence you to get you to obey are to you so their status whether they're authority figures whether they're older than you if it's your best friend for example will have a higher strength than just a stranger who you don't know on the street the immediacy here looks particularly at proximity more than anything else and it's to do with how close that group are to you in terms of distance so for example if somebody is stood in front of you asking you to do something you are much more likely to do it than if somebody's asking you to do something over the phone the example i always give in class is think about you know your mum stood in front of you in the kitchen saying that you need to wash the dishes now and she can see you she can see the dishes she's obviously gonna be able to see whether you've done them or not compared to when your mum's on holiday and she gives you a ring and says you know can you make sure that the kitchen's clean and the dishes are done you're much more likely to obey in the situation where she's in the room with you and the n stands for the number of people that there are in the group so the more the people the more the number of people in the group the more influence that will have on you in terms of obeying now thinking about the number of the group it's really important that you remember psychosocial law which is also known as the light bulb effect now this suggests that yes then the influence of the group will increase as the number of the group increases but it gets to a point where actually it doesn't make that much difference so for example you're much more likely to be influenced by a group of two than you are at just one person or a group of three rather than a group of two however litan suggests that once you get to the point where you're going from five people to six people the difference is actually quite small and he explains this using the light bulb effect so if we look at the screen we've got one light imagine a dark room and there's just one light in the room if we add a second light to the room it's going to make a massive difference to the light in that room if we add a third or a fourth okay the room is going to be quite light now but littan then argues that by the time we get to adding that sixth that final light bulb the light the room is going to be pretty lit up as it is so adding that extra light bulb at this stage is not going to make a difference particularly when we compare to when we had one light bulb and we just added another one that's going to make a massive difference whereas by the time we start adding six or seven or going from seven to eight it's not going to make that much difference lettan also suggests this multiplier effect and he did a study with milgram in 1969 that supports this where he had a confederate stood outside a university building milgram was actually on the sixth floor with his video camera and he had people looking up to the sky now he wanted to see whether the number of confederates the number of people stood outside the building looking up at something would increase the number of of people who were walking across the street these passes by who stopped and had a look at what was going on now they used between 1 and 15 confederates and they wanted to see whether the number actually made a difference now what they found was that the effect eventually levels off as the number of passes by grew so for example when there was one person or two people it made quite a big difference but again supporting this idea of psychosocial law by the time the group reached 13 changing it then to 14 actually made no real difference to the number of passers-by that stopped to look up at the university building lieutenant also suggests the divisional effects now this is where if you think about this idea of being able to talk to smaller groups rather than addressing one group altogether so the ability of a speaker to persuade the audience is divided among the members of the audience i always explain this if you think about a teacher a teacher stood in front of 30 kids trying to talk to them about obedience and behavior in a classroom will have a lesser effect than if the teacher keeps one pupil behind at the end and speaks to that one pupil about their behavior and therefore takes them away from their friends takes away that influence where they might feel that they need to act up now milgram's variation actually supports this in a variation experiment milgram used two peer confederates in the room so he had two he called them rebellious stooges which refused to continue with the experiment and milgram wanted to test this idea of how affected by our peers or by other people we are now milgram found that when there were two other people in the room with the participant who refusing to take part in the experiment the obedience levels dropped from 65 of participants going to 450 right down to 10. and milgram is able to conclude here which obviously supports social impact theory that when you are in you are strongly influenced by other people around you this is the mathematical formula that i was showing you about at the beginning where the immediacy or the impact that the obedience will have will depend on f the function of the strength times the immediacy times the number now the higher those numbers then the higher the effect will be so the conformity the obedience will increase if the strength impact and number increases moving on now to look at the comparison between agency theory and social impact theory if we look about agency theory agency theory was created by milgram as an explanation of obedience it suggests that we have an evolutionary trait to be to obey but it's also socialized within us from a very early age it's also argued that milgram's agency theory describes obedience and how we obey but doesn't actually explain why we obey some authority figures and there's a lacking there within the theory social impact theory wasn't actually designed just to explain obedience it explains conformity it can be used to explain prejudice and it can actually be as is in this case applied to obedience now social impact theory can explain high or low obedience within groups but it doesn't account for individual differences such as situation or personality social impact theory does not account for those people that will stand in a room full of 20 people when they're being told to do something and say no now i came up with this as quite a nice way to help you remember the evaluation points for social impact theory by just using the letters impact to help you remember this so the eyes individuals are passive receivers of others behavior m it mainly ignores individual differences p the predicting behavior in unusual circumstances is useful now by that i mean that social impact theory can be applied to schools and workplaces to help us to learn how to get people to obey and also what factors we can put into place to reduce people disobeying the a is the application of principles can be observed in everyday behavior so the bystander effect that litan uses we can actually see every day which is you're much more likely to go over and help a bystander or somebody who's in need on a street for example if you're on your own then when you're walking past that person or that situation with a group of five or six friends the c is that it cannot predict what will happen if two equal groups impact upon another so for example this does not explain football hooliganism if you've got one team of equal strength pitted against another team of equal strength then who is the source and target within this football match the targets and source of these interactions cannot be explained in every situation as we just referred to as an example with the football hooliganism