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
Normative social influence refers to instances where someone conforms in order to fit in and gain approval or avoid disapproval from other group members and this leads to conformity. This is known as compliance. Compliance is when an individual is exposed to the views or actions of a majority, they engage in social comparison. Because identifying with a majority is desirable, they change their views/actions to fit in with them. They go along with the majority without analysing why there is a difference.
Outline and Evaluate research into conformity (12 marks) Conformity is a type of social influence involving a change in belief or behaviour in order to fit in with a group. This change is in response to real (involving the physical presence of others) or imagined (involving the pressure of social norms / expectations) group pressure. The term conformity is often used to indicate an agreement to the majority position, brought about either by a desire to ‘fit in’ (normative) or because of a desire to be correct (informational). In 1935, Sherif conducted an experiment with the aim of demonstrating that people conform to group norms when they are put in an ambiguous situation. He used a lab experiment to study conformity.
The experiment consisted of several trials. For the most part, the majority of test subjects respond incorrectly. Psychologist, Solomon E. Asch, placed 123 test subjects from three institutions of higher learning in the minority situation described above. They could either repudiate the majority and go with the evidence of their senses or go along with the majority and be wrong. The minority subjects placed under group pressure displayed an increase in mistakes, in comparison to a near zero percent mistakes when tested individually.
Deffenbacher et al did a meta analysis from 21 studies they looked at 18 studies and found that higher anxiety has a negative impact on recall for the eyewitness. A meta analysis is good because it ensures that all the faults in the experiments cancel each other out and the fact that it was from different studies suggests there is a high validity. However by saying this, what type the experiments were are not known. For example if they were predominantly lab experiments then this will lack ecological validity and factors like demand characteristics, experimenter bias and the halo effect may have come into effect. Further support comes from Kohler et al (2002) who gave particpants 50 words and measured the galvine skin resistance (GSR) for the levels of stress.
However these views are not always long term and if the person left the group their behaviour and views might go back to how they were before and internalization, this is where the person values and behaviours have changed for long term, for example religion. The reason why people conform is believed to be due to two types of social influences, these are Normative and Informational. Normative is the desire to be liked and informational is the desire to be right. A man called Asch did a study into conformity; he wanted to find out whether participants would conform when in a situation where the answers may not be correct. Asch did the study on 50 genuine male participants, by using male participants we can’t generalise for women, we also can’t generalise it due to the size of the sample.
What one of the subjects was unaware of is that they were the one that the experiment was based on. The other participants were confederates of Asch, giving deliberate incorrect answers. When the confederates disagreed with the subject, Asch states, “He looks surprised, indeed incredulous, about the disagreement” (Asch, 656). Each of the 123 subjects had been placed in 18 rounds of questioning. Of these subjects, 75% of them changed their answers to the majority vote at least once.
Asch used a lab experiment to study conformity; he got 50 males to come and do the experiment and used 7 people who were confederates, the confederates had agreed in advance what their responses would be when shown with the line task. The real participant did not know this and was led to believe that the other seven participants were also real participants like themselves. There were 18 trials in total and the confederates gave the wrong answer on 12 trails. Asch was interested to see if the real participant would conform to the majority view. Asch measured the number of times each participant conformed to the majority view.
Had the subjects been informed of the study’s purpose, the question of ethics would be less ambiguous. Some would argue that the special conditions needed for this study required the lack of informed consent. Males in the study would perhaps behave differently had they known what the goal of the study was, or that they were even partaking in a study. Although this is a valid point, debriefing and the request of consent after the experiment were attainable and would have put together a more ethical and less questionable study. Various approaches could have been used to compensate for the lack of personal privacy and informed consent but were not.
Kohlberg and Gilligan have differences in their theories of moral/ethical development. One of the main issues Gilligan has with Kohlberg’s research is the fact that he only studied males and feels the results were biased against women. Since Kohlberg was an actual student of Piaget, he set up his theory in stages similar to his teacher. Kohlberg believes that morality is justice based and has developed 3 stages, 2 levels each, of moral development. The first stage is the pre-conventional stage: Children unquestionably obey rules set for them and then move into a flexibility of the rules based on individual influence.