you may have noticed in the last few videos about social influence when it comes to obedience and Conformity the majority of people do give in the social pressure and alter the behavior but there are a few individuals who resist like the 25% of people in Ash's study who refuse to give a single incorrect response and disagreed with a large group on every single critical trial and the 35% of people who refuse to continue to the highest shock level of mgms experiment even when they were put under intense pressure to obey what makes people like them able to resist is it something special about their personality or if the social pressures were stronger would they eventually just give in and go along with the group's demands or obey the authority figure like everybody else the psych boost app now has three features flash cards multiple choice quizzes and see if you can work out the key term from his definition with the key term tester try paper one for free right now and Patron supporters can watch psych boost videos ad free learn from over 17 hours of exclusive exam tutorial videos and access hundreds of digital and printable resources including my Maps quiz sheets worksheets teaching slides and more explanations of resistance when we talk about resistance to social influence we mean being able to hold out against the pressure to either conform or obey the individual must confront the group or authority figure and remain consistent with their own desired behavior and opinions we've already seen examples of resistance or social influence in the key studies in this unit when writing about the focus is usually on the mean Conformity rate 32% but this figure hides some important individual differences 75% of participants conformed at least once meaning 25% of participants were able to last through all 12 critical trials without once giving in and agreeing to the group in a single trial this must have been difficult these participants likely experienced significant social pressure worrying about what the other participants felt about them but despite this they remained independent in mgrm it's true the majority of participants 65% continued until the end however this means that 35% of participants were eventually able to stand up to the authority of the Yale University experimenter and refuse four time to continue to shock ending the experiment these resistors are interesting to psychologists do these people have a certain personality that makes them more resistant or if the situation was different would they also give the power of the group grou and the authority figure in this video we'll discuss two explanations of resistance to social influence a situational explanation social support and a dispositional explanation a personality characteristic called locus of control explanations of resistance of social influence social support one factor that's SP to make resistance or social influence easier is social support this is exactly what it sounds like an individual provides social support by going against resisting the group or the authority figure before we do this example of defiance makes it easier for us to go against the group or the authority figure we can be a little bit more precise and suggest how this works for both Conformity and obedience when it comes to Conformity the person providing social support is a denter they act as a non-conformist Ally their non-conformity breaks the unanimity of the group and also provides an alternate group to belong to someone providing social support by refusing the demand of an authority figure helps us resist by challenging the legitimacy of the authority of the person given the orders they also show the consequences of resistance and provide a role model for our own behavior social support evaluations our evaluations are not going to be too challenging as they're going to be based on the milgrim and Ash studies in one variation of mgrm two other Confederate teachers acted as social support the actual participant and the teacher Confederates shared the role of giving the sharks during the experiment the Confederate teachers refused to continue this social support resulted in a drop in obedience rate from 65% to just 10% Milgram argued this was due to the Defiance of the Confederates reducing the legitimacy of the scientist Authority when it comes to social support and Conformity Ash's unanimity variation can be used as an evaluation in this variation one dissenting Confederate broke the unanimity of the group by providing the correct response this presence of an ally caused a drop in Conformity rate from 32% down to 5.5% in the study with a similar setup by Alan Lavine the participants even use the social support of a denter with thick glasses who claim to have very poor eyesight suggesting any amount of social support can help individuals resist the pressure to conform as with many Topics in your psychology course we can use a competing Theory as an evaluation in this case we can suggest that even with sign ific social support there are individuals who are obey and conform 10% in the mgrm variation and 5.5% in the ash variation social support is situational it may be that some people's dispositions their personality makes them particularly susceptible to social influence even in the presence of social support one dispositional factor is the topic of the next section locus of control and we could say someone with an external locus of control is more susceptible to social influence as well as someone of an authoritarian personality covered in the previous social influence video explanations of resistance of social influence locus of control the locus of control scale was created by rter it's measured from high internal to high external and most people will be around the middle exactly where an individual Falls in this Continuum depends on what they interpret as the cause of their experiences which will go on to influence their behavior so if someone has an internal o to control then they believe they have personal control over their lives it's internal because the Locust Place of control is inside themselves so if they succeed or fail they see themselves as responsible for the outcome because of this these people are more likely to take personal responsibility for their actions as you may expect these people are going to be more able to resist social pressure having an external locus of control refers to individuals who see the place that controls their lives as outside of themselves this external control could be fate luck or powerful external forces like the government because they see the events in their lives as being due to these external factors they're less likely to feel responsibility for their actions and feel less able and motivated to make real changes in their lives for these reasons people with an external locus of control are less likely to resist social pressure let's clarify these points for both Conformity and obedience when it comes to Conformity people with an internal locus of control Ro are more likely to resist group pressure they believe in their own ability to make correct decisions and they feel they have a responsibility to stand by what they believe for obedience again it's those of an internal locus and control that are most likely to resist they feel better equipped to stand against the authority figure as they're more independent and self-confident that sense of personal responsibility also gives them a drive to refuse orders that don't match their own values locus of control evaluations first some research on locus of control and obedience Holland completed replication of mgrm study but this study participants will also assess for the locus of control it was found that 37% of those of an internal locus of control refuse to continue to the higher shock level compared to 23% of those of an external locus of control so we could just say that this supports the idea that an internal locus of control helps you resist the pressure to obey still we could add to this as the difference isn't huge and the majority 63% of people with internal locus of control still gave the higher shock level this would suggest that Locust of control is only a partial possibly a minor explanation of resistance to social influence for research on Conformity Spectre asked 157 undergraduate participants to complete two questionnaires one measuring their locus of control and one measuring their tendency to conform to normative and informational social influence these are are the two explanations for Conformity we discussed in the first social influence video now spectre's research did show a significant correlation between having an external locus of control and being able to resist normative social influence and you could just leave it like that as a positive valuation but if you want to be fancy we could also talk about the fact there was no correlation found between conforming to informational social influence and Locus to control suggesting internals don't feel a need to conform to be liked but both externals and internals look to others for correct information and will conform if they feel the group is correct so locus of control does influence Conformity but again it's not a complete explanation a last point for a criticism will be to point out that the relationship between locus of control and resistance to social influence is correlational there are other factors that could be related to having an external or internal locus of control that have also been suggested as being involved in resistance of social influence these include someone's level of social anxiety the sense of personal morality because individuals who see an action as morally wrong are likely to resist even if there's social pressure and social status as people have higher Social Status may feel more empowered to resist social pressure I want to thank everyone over on patreon 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