CHAPTER 2: WHY DO GOOD PEOPLE DO BAD THINGS

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INTRODUCTION:

WHAT IS THE MAIN POINT OF THIS SECTION:

The first section notes that WW2 casts a large shadow over the last half-century of social psychology. Much of social psychology has been concerned about why seemingly average and decent people participated in gruesome events. The main point of this chapter will be social influence. The cruelties that happened in WW2 spurred social psychologists onto doing creative research; but it also led to a number of deadends, incorrect conclusions and even unethical research on their behalf.

Hogg and Vaughan (2011) define social influence as 'the process where attitudes and behavior are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other people'.

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2) CLASSIC APPROACHES TO SOCIAL INFLUENCE

The topic of social influence is divided into three main topics:

Compliance

Conformity

Obedience

2.1) Compliance: 'Could you please do this?'

WHAT IS THE MAIN POINT OF COMPLIANCE:

Research into compliance explores the various factors involved with people saying yes or no to a request. For instance, Freedman's and Fraiser's foot in the door (1966) theory shows how adding a simple request before your actual one can boost the number of agreeing participants from 20% to 50%. The reason psychologists theorise this works is because people want to be seen as consistent.

Door in the face technique shows that a large request by itself will be ignored - but if then followed by a smaller request, compliance goes from 20% of participants to 50%.

2.2) Conformity: 'Everyone else is doing this'

Initially seems more promising in answering why good people do bad things; conformity is about social pressure in changing a person's judgement. For example, changing one's judgement when one knows it's true.

Information influence: We assume that other people are better-informed that we are and so we look to them for guidance. This process can help shed light on the influence of fashion, shared customs ,etc.

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QUESTIONS

What is social influence?

Hogg and Vauhghan define social influence as the process where attitudes and behavior are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other people.

What was the unethical research mentioned in the beginning?

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LEARNING OUTCOMES

Be able to describe the difference between compliance, conformity and obedience

Be able to compare and contrast classic studies on social influence (e.g. Milgram's obedience experiments, Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment) with more recent research

Be able to discuss recent attempts to explore the role of language in social influence.

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Group influence and social identity

SURVEY:

Introduction and conclusion suggest that the section will be focused on two very different prison studies - one that suggests that group influence is a good thing and the other that it's a bad thing.

There was a diagram of surveillence; how could this come into play?

QUESTIONS:

'THE STANFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT

What was the stanford prison experiment?

Philip Zombardo created a fake prison in the basement of the university he taught in the psychology department, and hired only men as the guards.

What was its objective?

What were the results?

After some initial rebellion by the prisoners, the guards began to act with increasingly harsh and the prisoners began acting like real prisoners.

What does this tell us about group influence and social identity?

The Stanford Prison experiment shows us that people can easily lose sight of themselves in a group.

How do this study relate to compliance, conformity and obedience?

THE BBC PRISON STUDY

QUESTIONS:

What was the BBC Prison Study?

The BBC Prison Study attempted to address what they considered serious shortcomings of the Stanford prison experiment. For one thing, while Stanford claimed that the guards 'naturally' fell into a role of abuse, this wasn't true - the briefing he had given the soldiers outlined that they were to make the prisoners feel hopeless and desolate.

Furthermore, it showed that the guards didn't fall into the overwhelming majority of abusive; there were three categories found. The abusive group, the tough-but-fair lot, and the gentle guards.

What made matters worse was that he had almost described it as 'normal' and thus acceptable for people in power to behave this way!

What did the study consist of?

The study this time consisted of simply telling the assigned guards that they could run the prison however they saw fit to establish order. What this meant was enforcing solitary confinement, restricting their diets to bread and water - interestingly, the guards tended not to be comfortable with their position, stating it as authoritarian! The prisoners, while unhappy, also didn't try change things and the reason was because they could be promoted to guards... Instead of changing things for their group, they instead focused on moving onto the higher status group, referred to as individual mobility.