Social influence — AQA A-Level Psychology
Test yourself on Social influence with AQA A-Level practice questions.
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Social influence explained
Conformity is yielding to group pressure.
Read the full explanation
Compliance is a superficial change to fit in, without changing private beliefs. Identification is a temporary change in public and private beliefs to align with a valued group, only in their presence. Internalisation is a permanent change where public and private beliefs align, driven by Informational Social Influence (ISI)—the desire to be right. Normative Social Influence (NSI) drives compliance to be liked. Asch investigated variables affecting conformity. Conformity increased with group size up to three confederates, then plateaued. Breaking unanimity with a dissenter reduced conformity. Increasing task difficulty increased conformity, shifting the driver from NSI to ISI.
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.
Your focus
- Distinguish between compliance, identification, and internalisation as types of conformity.
- Explain normative and informational social influence as reasons for conformity.
- Analyse how group size, unanimity, and task difficulty affected conformity in Asch's research.
Show all 15 objectives
- 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.
Social influence exam tips
Marking Points
- Define compliance as a temporary public change without private belief change, driven by NSI.
- Define identification as a change in public behaviour and private beliefs only while associated with a specific group.
- Define internalisation as a permanent public and private change, driven by ISI.
- Explain how Asch demonstrated that increasing group size increases conformity up to a majority of three.
- Describe how breaking unanimity by introducing a dissenting confederate reduces conformity.
- Explain that increasing task difficulty increases conformity due to ambiguity.
- 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.
Examiner Tips
- 💡Use examples like adopting a student lifestyle (identification) versus becoming a vegetarian permanently (internalisation).
- 💡Link Asch's variations (group size, unanimity, task difficulty) to NSI and ISI.
- 💡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.
Common Mistakes
- Confusing NSI and ISI; correction: NSI is about being liked, ISI is about being right.
- Ignoring identification; correction: explicitly distinguish identification from compliance and internalisation.
- Misunderstanding Asch's group size findings; correction: conformity peaks at three confederates and plateaus.
- 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.