Lecture Notes: Social Influence and Psychology

Overview

• Daily Patreon live streams until Paper 2, with a few before Paper 3.
• Total of 20 hours of live streams available to everyone at the signups level and above.
• Provides revision support with combined content from social influence videos.

Resources

• Recommended: Download 2022 AS and A-level past papers from AQA's website.
• Psych Boost app for active learning via flashcards.
  • Free for all Paper 1 topics.
• Additional support on Patreon, with 16+ hours of tutorial videos and printable resources.

Key Topics Covered

Conformity

• Levels of Conformity:
  • Compliance: Shallow level; external agreement, but internal disagreement to avoid rejection (NSI).
  • Identification: Intermediate level; behavior and private values change only with group.
  • Internalization: Deep level; genuine personal opinion change due to ISI.

Explanations

• Normative Social Influence (NSI): Driven by desire to be liked; leads to superficial conformity.
• Informational Social Influence (ISI): Driven by desire to be correct; leads to permanent behavior change.

Asch's Experiments

• Studied conformity in line judgment tasks with male college students.
• Found 32% overall conformity rate.
• Variations in group size, unanimity, and task difficulty affected results.

Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment

• Role adaptation in a simulated prison environment among randomly assigned guards and prisoners.
• Demonstrated situational power of social roles in influencing behavior.

Obedience

Milgram's Experiments

• Explored destructive obedience with participants as "teachers" administering shocks.
• Results showed high levels of obedience under authority.
• Variations included proximity, location, and uniform.
• Supported concepts of agentic state and legitimacy of authority.

Authoritarian Personality

• Adorno's Theory: High obedience linked to authoritarian personality shaped by strict upbringing.
• Measured using F-scale.
• Criticized for potential biases and over-simplification.

Resistance to Social Influence

• Social Support: Increases individual's confidence to resist conformity and obedience.
• Locus of Control: Internals more likely to resist social influence than externals.

Minority Influence

• Consistency, Commitment, Flexibility: Key for minority influence to convert majority views.
• The Snowball Effect: Slow initial influence accelerates as more adopt the minority view.

Social Change

• Minorities affecting societal change through consistency and influencing majority views.
• Use of normative and informational social influences to drive change.

Evaluation and Research

• Studies highlighted limitations and methodological critiques, including issues of ecological validity and ethical concerns.
• Real-life applications in movements such as Civil Rights and LGBTQ+ rights.

Additional Notes

• Test knowledge using the Psych Boost app.
• Support and extended resources available on Patreon.
• Acknowledgement to supporters and contributors.