Component 02: Social Influence - Key Concepts — OCR GCSE Psychology

Component 02 Social Influence investigates how our thoughts, emotions, and actions are shaped by interactions with our social environment. The unit focuses on the core concepts of conformity, obedience, bystander behaviour, and crowd dynamics, examining why individuals align with group consensus or comply with authoritative commands.

Understanding these key concepts is critical for unpicking real-world social phenomena such as collective riots, altruistic emergency responses, and historical atrocities. Within OCR GCSE Psychology, this topic bridges foundational psychological theory with empirical research methods, evaluating both situational and dispositional explanations of human conduct.

• →Conformity: The tendency to alter one's beliefs, attitudes, or actions to match those of a peer group, driven by normative or informational social influence.
• →Obedience: A type of social influence where an individual acts in direct response to an explicit command issued by a perceived legitimate authority figure.
• →Situational vs Dispositional Factors: The debate contrasting external environmental cues (such as uniform, proximity, or group size) with internal personality traits (such as self-esteem or locus of control).
• →Bystander Behaviour: The observation that individuals are less likely to offer help to a victim in an emergency when other passive onlookers are present, primarily caused by diffusion of responsibility.
• →Deindividuation: A psychological state of reduced self-awareness and personal responsibility often experienced in large crowds, leading to uncharacteristic antisocial or aggressive actions.

• Defines conformity as a change in behaviour or belief to match a group, often under real or imagined pressure.
• Identifies majority influence as pressure from a larger group on an individual or smaller group.
• Distinguishes compliance, a public change without private agreement, from internalisation, a genuine private acceptance.
• Explains how a unanimous majority can produce conformity even when the correct answer is clear, as in Asch's line-judgement studies.
• Defines collective behaviour as how people act differently in groups or crowds than when alone.
• Distinguishes pro-social crowd behaviour, such as helping or cooperating, from anti-social crowd behaviour, such as aggression or destruction.
• Explains that the same crowd can produce helping or harmful actions depending on context and norms.
• Links crowd behaviour to a feature of crowd psychology such as deindividuation or anonymity.
• Identifies obedience as following a direct order from a person perceived as an authority figure
• Distinguishes obedience from conformity by noting that obedience involves an explicit instruction rather than mere group pressure
• Explains that the authority figure is seen as having the legitimate right to give the order
• Applies the concept to a concrete example in which a named person issues an instruction and another person complies
• Recognises that obedience can lead to harmful as well as helpful behaviour

• 💡Read the stem carefully to see whether it asks for a definition, a type of conformity or an explanation of majority influence.
• 💡Eliminate options that describe obedience to an authority figure rather than matching a group.
• 💡Check that the chosen option names the pressure from the majority, not just a change in behaviour.
• 💡Identify whether the described behaviour helps or harms others before choosing an option.
• 💡Eliminate options that describe individual behaviour rather than collective or crowd behaviour.
• 💡Check that the chosen option links the behaviour to a crowd feature such as anonymity or shared identity.
• 💡Underline the words 'order' and 'authority figure' in the question before choosing an option, because these are the defining features
• 💡Reject options that describe imitation or group pressure with no instruction, since these describe conformity
• 💡When an option names a real-life or research example, check whether an explicit instruction was given and whether the person giving it was seen as entitled to do so
• 💡Ensure you explicitly state whether a factor is 'situational' or 'dispositional' in 2-mark and 4-mark short questions to guarantee the categorization marks.
• 💡When evaluating studies or theories, avoid generic statements like 'this study lacks ecological validity'; instead, explain how an artificial laboratory setup alters participants' natural social responses.
• 💡Always match research studies to their exact named researchers specified in the OCR specification (e.g. Pilvin et al., Milgram, Asch) rather than attributing findings vaguely to 'psychologists'.

• Confuses conformity with obedience; keep conformity as matching a group and obedience as following an authority figure's command.
• Treats all conformity as genuine belief; distinguish compliance from internalisation.
• Assumes a majority must be large; note that a unanimous majority of modest size can still exert strong pressure.
• Treats all crowd behaviour as anti-social; recognise that crowds can also help and cooperate.
• Confuses deindividuation with losing all self-control; keep it as a reduced sense of personal identity in a group.
• Assumes crowd behaviour is fixed; note that context and norms can shift a crowd towards helping or harm.
• Treats any change in behaviour caused by other people as obedience; reserve the term for following a direct order from an authority figure
• Assumes the authority figure must be physically present or powerful; explain that perceived legitimacy, not force, is what matters
• Describes obedience as always negative; recognise that everyday obedience to instructions is routine and often beneficial
• Confuses obedience with bystander behaviour; keep the focus on a person responding to an order rather than on whether someone intervenes
• Believing compliance, identification, and internalisation are interchangeable types of obedience; in reality, they are distinct depths of conformity.
• Assuming bystander apathy occurs because individuals do not care about the victim, when empirical evidence demonstrates it is driven by cognitive mechanisms like pluralistic ignorance and diffusion of responsibility.
• Treating locus of control as a situational factor, whereas it is strictly a dispositional personality variable measuring perceived personal agency.

1. 1Day 1-2: Master core definitions (conformity, obedience, deindividuation, bystander effect) and produce comparative flashcards distinguishing situational from dispositional factors.
2. 2Day 3-5: Detail the core studies (e.g. Milgram, Pilvin et al.), memorising their aim, method, quantitative findings, and key ethical and methodological criticisms.
3. 3Day 6-8: Practice structuring 6-mark evaluate and discuss questions using PEEL (Point, Evidence, Explain, Link) paragraphs that blend theory and counter-arguments.
4. 4Day 9-10: Complete OCR Component 02 past-paper questions under strict timed conditions and audit responses against official mark schemes.

• 📋Multiple-choice and 1-2 mark identification questions assessing definitions of conformity types or situational factors.
• 📋3-4 mark application questions where a novel scenario is presented (e.g. a student adopting a school uniform policy) requiring you to explain behaviour using psychological concepts.
• 📋6-mark extended response questions requiring description and balanced evaluation of a named theory or study (e.g. agency theory or research into crowd behaviour).