Conformity, obedience and the social influences involved This essay examines the likely outcomes of human behaviour. By analysing Asch’s study into conformity and Hofling’s experiment about obedience, the extent to which individuals can avoid such social influences is investigated. There’s been great research into why people conform; following Asch’s study Deutsch and Gerald found that there are two types of social influence which makes people conform. Normative social influence; where individuals conform to be accepted and belong to the group. Benefits come from belonging in a group, individuals may conform on the surface but disagree with the group internally.
Whereas Interpretivists would favour the Field experiment because it doesn’t not take a scientific approach and concentrates on producing qualitative data – information that can be captured that isn’t numerical, can be obtained by getting in depth information on someone’s thoughts, feelings, motivations, attitudes and values through participant observation, unstructured interviews, diaries and letters – they give an insight on what other people are actually feeling and what it is like to be in their shoes. With the Laboratory experiment there are practical and ethical issues. In practice it would be impossible to identify and
The research is, therefore, unrepresentative of interests of wider population. Secondly, the questionnaires are seen as being inflexible. When the questionnaire’s responses are finalised, the researcher can see little scope for formulating new interests or ideas and exploring them as it can be done in participant observation. Furthermore, the interviewer may collect biased data because in standardised questions he/she already imposes interests of their own and excludes questions that might be important to respondent. Thirdly, where the sociologist has interpretivist perspective, detachment may seem a big barrier to overcome.
The the study was replicated by Hofling (1966), who aimed to test the possibility that obedience may change when in more realistic circumstances, this study found an obedience rate of 95%, so obedience does occur in real life settings. Milgram's study has generalisability because of this. A limitation of this study is lack of mundane realism and so it has low ecological validity, with participants possibly not believing the confederate had not come to harm with the use of electric shocks. Another limitation is that study has many ethical issues, like deception as well as lack of informed consent, these conditions may have been required but are still obvious issues with participants being lied to about the true aim of the study. Another ethical issue that would have been prominent was protection from psychological
According to Cotton and Devilly, 2004, psychology debriefing is not always necessary when traumatic stress issues manifests. Cotton and Devilly believe that using crisis intervention stress debriefing (CISD) and the crisis intervention stress management (CISM) were more damaging than helpful. They contemplated intermittent approaches for treating trauma survivors, which they believed could be more counterproductive. Mitchell suggests that Cotton and Devilly’s research was erroneous because psychological debriefing and CISD are not similar, and that psychological debriefing is more of an exclusive therapy. He also stated the CISD works better with group settings.
A laboratory experiment can be replicated by other scientists as lab experiments are very reliable. Due to such advantages of lab experiments, positivist sociologists favour this scientific method as it produces cause and effect relationships. However positivists still accept the disadvantages and limitations of lab experiments. One drawback of this experiment is that it is difficult to obtain the informed consent of some groups such as children, or people who have learning difficulties or those who cannot understand the nature of the experiment. An example of where participants were misled was in Milgram’s experiment.
As a conclusion of Honey Mumford test both participants represent high Activist preference furthermore any planned personal developments should include experimental activities rather than lectures. Secondly I’ve used Kolb’s test to reduce potential risk of misunderstand questions in first test due to both participants non being native English speakers. Both percipients in Kolb’s test1 determinate very high Doing – Feeling preferred learning style furthermore both participants accordingly to Kob’s outlines prefer Active, experimentation and experience based tuitions. Utilizing Honey and Mumford’s Learning Styles Questionnaire and Kolb’s Test, individual scores have confirmed preferred learning styles of participants , both Krzysztof and Matt have a strong skill in active learning style combined with experimentation and experience based tuitions. AC 1.2 Use a simple technique for identifying own development needs and the development needs of another member of the team To identify developments needs I can use number of ways, such as interview , feedback from customers and colleagues , by observing work taking place, during annual appraisal interview, or by SWOT analyze.
I will also attempt to identify the barriers to communication in this dialogue and explore the reasons why these skills were used ineffectively, and suggest how they could have been improved upon. Rapport-building is defined by Robbins (1986, p. 207, as cited in Study Guide) as ‘the ability to enter someone else’s world, to make him feel that you understand him, that you have a strong common bond’ I think it is at the very core of effective interpersonal communication because it ‘is one of the most important features or characteristics of unconscious human interaction’ and without it the purpose of the interaction cannot be achieved. It is ‘commonality of perspective, being in "sync", being on the same "wavelength" as the person with whom you are talking’ (http://www.inspirationalsolutions-lp.co.uk/theimportanceofrapport.pdf). Following that line of thinking it is essential to establish rapport as soon as possible in a didactic interpersonal conversation, whatever the purpose of the discussion is – to learn, to relate, to play or to help (De Vito, p.80). The very first sentence that Hanna says demonstrates an attempt to establish rapport “Howya doing?” (he does not wait for an answer and continues talking)
At this point in the relationship, communication may be exchanged via both verbal and nonverbal ways. When examining the Social Penetration Theory, it is clear that while Altman and Taylor’s theory is relatively thorough, there are still some aspects in which the theory is not applicable. Critique 1: Reliability in Testing Procedures The Social Penetration Theory, although thoroughly tested to an extent, was unable to be tested to its fullest thus making it a fallible theory. Due to the content of the theory, it should have been tested under long-term circumstances; however, because of the invasive nature of following a relationship for such a long time, the theory was instead tested in shorter spans as a “truncated model of the [original] theory” (Miller, 1959, p. 173). The
Difficulty in getting a true random selection for sample means that researchers may end up with an opportunistic sample which may support their hypothesis better on the surface but is not a realistic cross-section of the population being studied (Hayes, 2000). Targeting convenience sample groups or dropping data that doesn’t agree with the direction of your study may not be ethical but is an potential way make data say what you want. Another possible weakness of quantitative research is that there may be a whole lot of information that could be being overlooked, while this missed information could enrich the study it could also be irrelevant – the problem is that the researcher may never know. Qualitative research does get this richness of data, the research has a level of depth that may not be acquirable