Social Psychology Practical

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Aim: To find out whether people are obedient because they want to be (autonomous state) or feel they have to (agentic state).

http://www.psychteacher.co.uk/social-influence/obedience-explanations.html

Hypothesis: I predict that most people will be obedient because they feel like they have to, making them more agentic (one-tailed - directional alternate hypothesis)

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Method/ Procedure

Questionnaire which included open-ended questions, closed questions, questions with a likert scale, with a rating scale and questions that asked the ppt to identify characteristics.

A few questions that didn't relate to the aim as much - avoid demand characteristics

2 questions that asked the same thing but were worded differently to try and catch out liars (split half)

Produced qualitative (open ended questions) and quantitative data (closed questions)

Pilot survey with 3 people - gained feedback and identified issues with the questionnaire and then altered them

Official questionnaire with 20 people

Selected by opportunity sampling as they were already there in school

Gave all ppts consent forms

Told the ppts roughly, using passive deception, that the aim of the study was to find out about levels of obedience

Ppts allowed to withdraw at any point

Questionnaire unlikely to produce psychological harm

Debrief given at the end so they knew the full aim

Questionnaires destroyed after analysis

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Conclusions

My results generally shows a mixture of people choosing answers that equate to them having a personality of being autonomous and agentic. This doesn't support my hypothesis that more people are agentic than autonomous so I have come up with an alternate conclusion that people are obedient because they are a mixture of autonomous and agentic personalities.

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Evaluation

Strengths:

Ethical - consent forms (informed consent), debrief forms where the aim was fully explained, no physical or psychological harm, right to withdraw, data destroyed afterwards

No gender bias, equal numbers of males and females - increased population validity

Real life application (obedience in school, workplace)

No leading questions - no experimenter bias - increased internal validity

Can be repeated - increased reliability

Weaknesses:

Small sample size - reduced population validity

Possible demand characteristics - although we used passive deception, may have still guessed the aim and adapted answers son as not to appear too agentic or autonomous - reduced internal validity

Culture bias - all from UK - reduced population validity

Age bias- all between 16 and 18 - reduced population validity

Opportunity sampling - unrepresentative sample

Social desirability - ppts giving what they deem to be socially acceptable answers rather than truthful answers - reduced internal validity

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Improvements:

Avoid demand characteristics by telling the ppts less of the real aim but by debriefing them at the end so as to keep the study ethical.

Use a much larger sample size with a larger variety of ages and backgrounds so as to get a more representative sample and increased population validity.