Outline and Evaluate the Effect of Social Influence on Conformity (12 Marks)

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Outline and evaluate the effect of social influence on conformity (12 marks) In 1935 Sherif did research into social conformity using a laboratory experiment of the auto kinetic effect. He placed participants in a darkened room and used a visual light illusion to test if people would conform to the common opinion of whether a spot of light moved. The test was ambiguous as the spot only appears to move, meaning that the individual findings were very varied when the subjects were placed in a room on their own. When tested in groups of three with the participants voicing their opinions aloud most participants converged to a common estimate of cm of light movement if there were two other people opposing them. It was concluded that people look to those with more knowledge for guidance in the desire to be right, this is informational social influence. Asch (1951) aimed to study the effects of social pressure on people’s willingness to conform. He used a line experiment on American male students as a form of an unambiguous task, all but one of the men were confederates and had decided prior to the experiment wrong answers to the test in an attempt to sway the naive participants answer. After 18 trials of asking them to choose the line the same length of the original line, it was found that 75% of people conformed at least once, and many often did more than that. There was evidence of both normative and informational social influence in this trial as some participants admitted to conforming without truly believing the confederates in order to avoid being made fun of, though some actually began to believe the false answers. These studies were both done over 50 years ago making it difficult to relate them to modern time situations. In the 1970s Perrin and Spencer repeated Asch’s study but in England rather than America, they found that only one in 396 participants

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