Social influence — AQA A-Level Psychology
Test yourself on Social influence with AQA A-Level practice questions.
Start free
7 days Premium · Then the free plan continues · No card, no charge
Social influence explained
Conformity is a change in behaviour or belief caused by real or imagined group pressure.
Read the full explanation
Kelman's three types differ in depth: compliance is public agreement only and stops when the group leaves; identification is temporary change adopted to belong to a valued group; internalisation is genuine private acceptance that lasts. Deutsch and Gerard pair these with two motives - informational influence, the need to be right, which operates on ambiguous or difficult tasks and produces internalisation, and normative influence, the need to be liked, which produces compliance. Asch's line task gave 36.8% conformity on critical trials against under 1% in the control, with 75% conforming at least once. Conformity plateaued at three confederates, fell to roughly 5.5% with a dissenter, and rose as the lines grew similar.
Conformity to social roles as investigated by Zimbardo.
A social role is the set of behaviours expected of someone in a given position, and the claim under test is that ordinary people take on those behaviours simply by being put in the position. Zimbardo converted a Stanford basement into a mock prison, screened 24 emotionally stable male volunteers, allocated them randomly to guard or prisoner and stripped away individuality with uniforms, numbers and mirrored sunglasses. Guards escalated from petty rule-enforcement to psychological cruelty, prisoners rebelled then became passive and depressed, one was released after 36 hours, and the study was stopped after six days of a planned fortnight. The conclusion was situational: the role, not the personality, produced the behaviour. Fromm objected that only about a third of guards were brutal.
Explanations for obedience: agentic state and legitimacy of authority, and situational variables affecting obedience including proximity and location, as investigated by Milgram, and uniform. Dispositional explanation for obedience: the Authoritarian Personality.
Obedience is following a direct order from a figure of authority. In the baseline study 40 men gave what they believed were shocks rising to 450 volts: every one reached 300 volts and 65% went to the maximum. Two explanations account for this. In the agentic state a person acts as an instrument of authority and passes responsibility upward, while binding factors such as the prods keep him there despite obvious moral strain. Legitimacy of authority adds that we are socialised into hierarchies, so an authority accepted as legitimate can direct destructive acts. The situation matters: obedience fell to 40% in the same room, 30% with forced contact, 22.5% by telephone, 47.5% in a run-down office and 20% with an ordinary man giving orders. Adorno instead located the cause in personality.
Explanations of resistance to social influence, including social support and locus of control.
Resisting pressure is far easier when someone else has broken ranks first. Social support works by destroying the unanimity of the group: a dissenting confederate cut conformity in the line task from 36.8% to about 5.5%, and Allen and Levine showed the ally need not even be credible, since a dissenter wearing thick glasses who admitted poor eyesight still freed participants to disagree. Two confederates who refused to continue cut obedience from 65% to 10%, because they model that defiance is possible. Locus of control is a personality dimension: internals believe outcomes follow from their own actions, externals credit luck, fate or powerful others. Internals resist more because they take responsibility and need less approval, and Holland found 37% of them stopped before the maximum shock against 23% of externals.
Minority influence including reference to consistency, commitment and flexibility.
A small group changing what the majority privately believes works differently from conformity: it produces conversion and internalisation rather than public compliance, and it is slow. Moscovici had two confederates call clearly blue slides green. A consistent minority moved participants to agree on 8.42% of trials, against 1.25% when the minority was inconsistent and 0.25% in the control. Agreement between members and over time makes the majority stop and ask why anyone would hold such a view. Personal cost adds weight, since a group that risks something is taken more seriously, which is the augmentation principle. A rigid position is dismissed as dogmatic: in Nemeth's mock jury only the confederate willing to compromise moved the group. Deeper processing then spreads the view by a snowball effect.
The role of social influence processes in social change.
Change happens when a minority view becomes the majority one, and the processes studied in the laboratory can be traced through real campaigns. The civil rights movement drew attention to segregation, held a consistent message, and its activists showed commitment by accepting beatings and arrest, which augments the message. Converts accumulated until a snowball effect turned the position into law, and social cryptomnesia means the change is remembered while its source is forgotten. Conformity research contributes differently: normative influence underlies social norms campaigns, and Nolan found households cut their electricity use when told their neighbours were cutting theirs, while a message about saving money did little. Obedience contributes through gradual commitment, where a small order accepted makes a larger one harder to refuse.
Your focus
- Describe how compliance, identification and internalisation differ in depth and in whether the change outlasts the group.
- Outline what happened to conformity in Asch's study when group size, unanimity and task difficulty were varied.
- Explain whether a given scenario shows informational or normative influence, using the ambiguity of the task as the test.
Show all 23 objectives
- Evaluate Asch's findings using Perrin and Spencer, the triviality of the line task and the all-American male sample.
- Describe Zimbardo's mock prison procedure and what guards and prisoners did up to the study ending on day six.
- Explain why Zimbardo concluded the role rather than the personality caused the behaviour, referring to deindividuation.
- Evaluate the study using Fromm on the third of guards who were brutal and Zimbardo's own dual role as superintendent.
- Explain the agentic state and legitimacy of authority, naming the binding factors that keep a person obeying under strain.
- Describe what happened to obedience when Milgram varied proximity, location and uniform, quoting a figure for each.
- Apply the Authoritarian Personality to a described person, naming the F-scale traits and the parenting Adorno traced them to.
- Evaluate the dispositional explanation using the correlational Elms and Milgram data and acquiescence bias in the F-scale.
- Explain how a dissenter enables resistance by breaking unanimity rather than by being credible, using Allen and Levine.
- Outline the difference between an internal and an external locus of control and say why internals resist pressure more.
- Apply both explanations to a scenario, deciding whether the person resisted because of an ally or because of disposition.
- Evaluate locus of control using Twenge's finding that people grew more external while growing more resistant to authority.
- Explain how consistency, commitment and flexibility each make a minority more persuasive, naming the augmentation principle.
- Outline Moscovici's slide procedure and quote the agreement rates for the consistent and inconsistent minorities.
- Apply the three factors to a described campaign, identifying which one the minority is failing to show.
- Evaluate minority influence research using Martin's deeper-processing evidence against the triviality of naming slide colours.
- Explain how drawing attention, consistency, augmentation and the snowball effect convert a minority position into law.
- Outline how normative influence drives social norms campaigns and how gradual commitment works in obedience.
- Apply the processes to a real campaign, naming which process each event in it illustrates.
- Evaluate the applied evidence using Foxcroft's weak social norms results and Bashir on minorities provoking resistance.
Social influence exam tips
Marking Points
- Compliance: public agreement with private disagreement, so the change stops as soon as the group is no longer watching.
- Identification: change adopted because membership of the group is valued, so it lasts only while the person identifies with the group.
- Internalisation: the group's view is privately accepted, so the change persists in and out of the group's presence.
- Informational social influence: a cognitive need to be right, operating when the task is ambiguous, novel or a crisis, or when others are experts, and leading to internalisation.
- Normative social influence: an emotional need for acceptance and fear of rejection, leading to compliance in front of the group.
- Asch's procedure and findings: a naive participant answering next to last in a group of confederates gave the wrong answer on 36.8% of critical trials, and 75% conformed at least once.
- Group size: conformity rises steeply up to three confederates and then levels off, so more people does not simply mean more conformity.
- Unanimity: a single dissenter, even one giving a different wrong answer, cuts conformity to about a quarter of its previous level.
- Task difficulty: making the comparison lines more similar raises conformity, which is evidence for informational social influence.
- Evaluation: Perrin and Spencer found only one conforming response in 396 trials with British engineering students, suggesting the original findings are a child of their time.
- Evaluation: the task is trivial and the group are strangers, so the study lacks mundane realism and says little about conformity where the consequences matter.
- Evaluation: the sample was American male students, so the findings may not generalise to women or to collectivist cultures, where conformity rates are typically higher.
- Social roles are the behaviours and duties expected of a person occupying a position, and the claim is that the role rather than the personality drives the behaviour.
- Procedure: a mock prison at Stanford, 24 volunteers screened as emotionally stable, random allocation to guard or prisoner, and uniforms, numbers and sunglasses used to remove individual identity.
- Findings: guards became increasingly punitive, prisoners rebelled and then became passive and depressed, one prisoner was released after 36 hours, and the study ended on day six of a planned fortnight.
- Conclusion: situational forces and deindividuation, rather than the dispositions of the men involved, produced the behaviour.
- Evaluation: random allocation to role controls participant variables, so differences in behaviour can more confidently be attributed to the role itself.
- Evaluation: Banuazizi and Movahedi showed participants could guess how they were expected to behave, so the behaviour may be play-acting to a prison stereotype rather than conformity.
- Evaluation: Fromm noted that only about a third of guards behaved brutally while others helped prisoners, so the study exaggerates the power of the role and understates dispositional differences.
- Evaluation: Reicher and Haslam's BBC prison study produced the opposite pattern, with prisoners taking control, which social identity theory explains better than automatic role conformity.
- Evaluation: ethical problems, above all Zimbardo running the prison as superintendent while responsible for participant welfare, which compromised the right to withdraw.
- Agentic state: the individual comes to see himself as the instrument of an authority figure and shifts responsibility for the outcome to that figure, in contrast with the autonomous state.
- Agentic shift and binding factors: the shift occurs when a legitimate authority is perceived, and binding factors such as the prods and blaming the victim reduce the moral strain of continuing.
- Legitimacy of authority: societies are hierarchical and we are socialised to obey authority we recognise as legitimate, which explains how destructive authority can be granted the power to order cruelty.
- Proximity: obedience fell from 65% in the baseline to 40% with teacher and learner in the same room, 30% when the teacher had to force the learner's hand onto the plate, and 22.5% with orders given by telephone.
- Location: moving the study from Yale to a run-down office in Bridgeport cut obedience to 47.5%, showing that the prestige of the setting confers legitimacy.
- Uniform: replacing the experimenter with an ordinary member of the public in everyday clothes cut obedience to 20%, and Bickman found New York pedestrians far more likely to obey a man dressed as a guard than one in a jacket and tie.
- Authoritarian Personality: Adorno measured it with the F-scale and found high scorers were submissive to superiors, contemptuous of inferiors, rigid in their thinking and hostile to other groups, with the origin traced to harsh, conditional parenting and hostility displaced onto scapegoats.
- Evaluation: Elms and Milgram found obedient participants scored higher on the F-scale, but the evidence is correlational and cannot show that the personality caused the obedience.
- Evaluation: every F-scale item is worded so that agreeing produces a high score, so acquiescence bias means the scale may measure response style rather than authoritarianism.
- Evaluation: a dispositional explanation cannot account for whole populations behaving the same way, whereas social identity theory explains obedience as identification with the scientific enterprise.
- Evaluation: Orne and Holland argued participants did not believe the shocks were real, though Sheridan and King found high obedience when the shocks given to a puppy genuinely were.
- Social support: the presence of another person who dissents breaks the unanimity of the majority and makes independent behaviour possible.
- Evidence in conformity: a dissenting confederate reduced conformity from 36.8% to about 5.5%, and Allen and Levine showed the effect survives even when the dissenter is visibly unreliable, so it is unanimity rather than accuracy that is broken.
- Evidence in obedience: when two confederates refused to continue, obedience fell from 65% to 10%, because disobedient models make defiance appear legitimate.
- Locus of control: a continuum from high internal to high external, where internals attribute outcomes to their own behaviour and externals to luck, fate or powerful others.
- Why internals resist: they take personal responsibility for their actions, are more self-confident and achievement-oriented, and have less need for social approval.
- Evidence: Holland found 37% of internals refused to give the maximum shock compared with 23% of externals, so locus of control has some predictive value.
- Evaluation: Twenge found people have become more external over several decades while also becoming more resistant to authority, which is the opposite of what the explanation predicts.
- Evaluation: Rotter argued locus of control only shapes behaviour in novel situations, so it cannot explain resistance where a person is drawing on past experience.
- Evaluation: social support is situational and locus of control dispositional, so together they predict that the same person will resist in some groups and not others.
- The process is conversion: the majority is made to think about the message, so change is private and internalised rather than public compliance.
- Consistency: agreement between the members of the minority and agreement over time draws attention and signals a serious alternative view.
- Evidence: Moscovici's blue-green slide study produced agreement with the minority on 8.42% of trials when the minority was consistent, against 1.25% when it was not.
- Commitment: a minority that accepts personal risk or sacrifice is taken more seriously, which is the augmentation principle.
- Flexibility: Nemeth showed that a minority refusing to compromise is dismissed as rigid, while one that adjusts its position shifts the majority.
- The snowball effect: as more of the majority convert, the minority view gathers momentum until it becomes the new majority position.
- Evaluation: Martin found a message backed by a minority was more resistant to a counter-argument than the same message from a majority, which supports the deeper-processing account.
- Evaluation: identifying the colour of a slide carries no consequences, so the research lacks external validity when applied to jury decisions or political campaigns.
- Evaluation: laboratory groups have no history and face no hostility, whereas real minorities are abused and ostracised, so the difficulty of the task is understated.
- Drawing attention: a minority makes the majority aware of an issue it had not considered, as the marches made segregation visible to people who had ignored it.
- Consistency and deeper processing: the minority repeats its position over time and between its members, which makes the majority think about the message rather than dismiss it.
- The augmentation principle: activists who accept personal risk, such as the freedom riders, make the message harder to ignore.
- The snowball effect: converts accumulate until the minority position becomes the majority one and is written into law.
- Social cryptomnesia: the change is remembered but its origin in a minority is forgotten, so the new norm feels as though it was always held.
- Normative social influence in social norms interventions: Nolan found households reduced electricity use when told their neighbours were reducing theirs, whereas an appeal to save money had little effect.
- Obedience and gradual commitment: once a small instruction has been followed it is harder to refuse a larger one, which is how participants moved up the shock scale in small steps.
- Evaluation: Foxcroft's review of social norms interventions for student drinking found only a small reduction in the amount drunk and no change in how often, so the applied evidence is weak.
- Evaluation: Bashir showed people avoid behaving like a minority they see as stereotyped, so minority influence can provoke resistance rather than change.
- Evaluation: the explanations are indirect and the effects gradual, and much of the supporting evidence comes from artificial laboratory tasks, so their application to real change is limited.
Examiner Tips
- 💡For an extended response, cover the requested knowledge accurately before evaluating it with evidence, methodological limits and alternative explanations; follow the command word and any application material in the question.
- 💡In an application question, find the cue in the stem: an ambiguous task or an expert points to informational influence, while fear of standing out points to normative influence.
- 💡When outlining the variables, give the direction of the effect and a figure, not just the name of the variable.
- 💡Use the type of conformity to explain how long a change lasts - internalisation for permanent change, compliance for change that disappears with the group.
- 💡Do not retell the whole story. Three or four procedural points and the key findings earn the AO1, and the rest of a long answer should be evaluation.
- 💡If the scenario describes a new job, a uniform or an anonymous online setting, apply deindividuation and role expectation to the specific details given.
- 💡Ethics earns evaluation credit only when it is linked to the conclusions or to a cost-benefit judgement, not offered as a list of broken guidelines.
- 💡Match the explanation to the stem: a uniform or an impressive setting calls for the situational variables, while an upbringing or a set of rigid attitudes calls for the dispositional explanation.
- 💡An essay is stronger if the situational and dispositional explanations are set against each other rather than described one after the other.
- 💡Quote the figures. Obedience dropped is worth little; obedience dropped from 65% to 47.5% in the Bridgeport office is the creditable version.
- 💡Validity and ethical criticisms earn evaluation credit only when you state the consequence for what the study is able to claim.
- 💡Resistance is nearly always examined through a scenario, so name the concept, quote the cue from the stem and then explain the mechanism, rather than explaining the concept in the abstract.
- 💡The strongest evaluation contrasts the two explanations, since one is situational and the other dispositional.
- 💡If asked to evaluate locus of control, the meta-analysis showing people became more external yet more resistant is worth more than a general remark about correlational evidence.
- 💡Explain the process, not just the three factors. The marks are in saying why consistency makes the majority think, not in naming it.
- 💡In an application question, match each factor to a specific detail of the campaign described in the stem.
- 💡Have a clear contrast with conformity ready, because questions often ask you to compare influence that runs in the two directions.
- 💡This is examined synoptically, so plan to bring in the conformity, obedience and minority influence studies as supporting evidence rather than treating them as separate topics.
- 💡Put the steps in order and name them; an unordered list of ideas loses the structure marks in the AO1 band.
- 💡If the question names a campaign, use the details in the stem at every step instead of substituting your own example.
Common Mistakes
- Swapping the explanations round by writing that normative influence is about wanting to be right. Normative influence is about acceptance; informational influence is about accuracy.
- Saying Asch found that most people conformed. The 36.8% figure is the rate on critical trials and the 75% figure is the proportion conforming at least once, and the two are not interchangeable.
- Treating internalisation and compliance as strong and weak versions of the same thing instead of private versus public change.
- Describing group size as a straight-line relationship when conformity levels off after about three confederates.
- Calling the dissenter variation 'having a friend'. The dissenter can give a different wrong answer and still break the power of the group.
- Calling it a true experiment with a control condition. While the assigned role (guard or prisoner) was a manipulated independent variable, there was no non-prison control group, so the causal claim is weaker than students usually assume.
- Writing that prisoners were forbidden to leave. They were told they could not leave without parole, and it is the ambiguity of the right to withdraw, not its removal, that is criticised.
- Assuming every guard was sadistic, when the variation between guards is the strongest evidence against the situational conclusion.
- Using the study to explain obedience. It is about conformity to social roles; obedience to a direct order is Milgram, and the two are often blurred.
- Writing that participants were paid to continue or were not allowed to stop. They were told the money was theirs whatever happened, and the pressure came from four verbal prods.
- Confusing the agentic state with not caring. Participants showed real moral strain, sweating and protesting while they continued.
- Quoting 65% for every variation. Each situational variable has its own figure, and the credit comes from the comparison with the baseline.
- Describing the Authoritarian Personality as obedience to anyone, when the account is specifically about submission to perceived superiors and hostility to perceived inferiors.
- Treating the agentic state and legitimacy of authority as one explanation. Legitimacy is a property of the authority; the agentic state is the mental state of the person obeying.
- Saying the ally has to give the correct answer. A confederate giving a different wrong answer also reduced conformity, which is exactly the point about unanimity.
- Treating locus of control as two types of person rather than a continuum running from high internal to high external.
- Writing that internals do not conform or obey. The claim is a higher probability of resisting, and most internals in Holland research still obeyed.
- Confusing social support with conformity to a smaller group. The ally makes independent behaviour possible; it does not create a new majority to follow.
- Describing this as a small group conforming to the majority. The direction is reversed - the few change the many.
- Treating consistency as one person repeating themselves, when it has to be shown both across the members of the group and across time.
- Getting flexibility backwards and arguing that a minority should never give ground, when the finding is that some compromise increases influence.
- Quoting 8.42% as though it were a large effect without noting that it is agreement on a small proportion of trials.
- Writing a history of the civil rights movement instead of using it to illustrate the psychological processes. The credit is for the process, with the example attached to it.
- Claiming change comes from minority influence alone, when conformity through normative influence and obedience through gradual commitment are also required here.
- Leaving out social cryptomnesia, which is the step most often missed from the sequence.
- Assuming a social norms campaign always works, when the review evidence on student drinking is the standard counter-example.