Social Influence - Conforming to Roles; Minority Influence (7-Nov-2002)

Stanford Prison Experiment

(See Zimbardo study sheet)

Making judgements based on perceived situation/role is generally a useful thing, because it's a lot quicker than evaluating a specific situation/person's character.

To determine to what extent roles can influence people's behaviour, Zimbardo devised the Stanford Prison Experiment (1973) in which he enrolled a set of students, and arbitrarily divided them into a set of "guards" and "prisoners". Parts of the basement at Stanford University were converted to a "mock prison", and the participants were placed into the prison environment in order to find out how their roles would affect the way that they behaved.

After only a short time, the "guards" started to behave more and more aggressively towards the "prisoners": although Zimbardo had made it explicit that physical punishment was not permitted, mental abuse by the guards became more frequent. An attempt by the prisoners to rebel was dealt with by the guards isolating the ringleader and eventually the prisoners appeared to become more passive, and seemed to accept the situation.

As well as leading the experiment, Zimbardo himself took on the role of "prison governor", and so was the person who the prisoners had to approach when they wanted to leave the study. It seems that Zimbardo became too involved in his "governor" role and was not able to remain an objective observer of the experiment. It took the intervention of another psychologist to make Zimbardo realise that the experiment had gone too far, and he abandoned it after six days (it had been planned to run the prison for fourteen days).

It could have been that the participants' behaviour was as a result of stereotyped expectations, and some of the comments made during debriefing support this view. However, Zimbardo himself said that the distinction between the subjects individual personality and the assumed role became blurred. Deindividuation is the term used to describe a loss of personality in favour of a mask or social role.

This study suggests that behaviour can be affected by a situation, and isn't just governed by personality.

Minority Influence

Moscovici set up a study to determine the extent to which a large group could be influenced by a minority. He set up an experiment which reversed Asch's in that there was a minority of "stooges" who would give a deliberately incorrect answer to a question. In this experiment, participants were shown cards that had different shades of blue on them, and were asked to report the colour they saw. The stooges consistently reported "green".

Moscovici found that with two stooges giving consistent answers, a rate of 8% conformity was observed (i.e. non-stooges also reported green). This rate dropped to around 1% when the stooges only reported green for some of the cards. In either case, the conformity rate is much lower than that reported by Asch, but still significant.

We see minority influence at work in society, e.g. womens' rights, gay rights started as minority movements but managed to effect social change. For minority influence to work, it appears that:

• consistency is important for minority influence to be effective. In Moscovici's study, conformity was much higher when the stooges always said "green"
• the majority has to be flexible and prepared to "hear out" the minority. It is likely that if Moscovici had used "black" and "white", there would have been less conformity. But since "blue" and "green" are closer, there is more room for discussion.
• The status of the person expressing a minority view is important. For example, if the stooges had been wearing spectacles, it's likely that they would have had less influence
• For a minority to influence society as a whole, the minority opinion has to link to current social trends. E.g. gay rights probably wouldn't have got very far in 1930's Germany

From Web links (3) ), the minority is likely to influence the majority if:

• the minority disrupts the established norm and produces doubt and uncertainty in the mind of the majority
• the minority makes itself visible, focuses attention on itself
• the minority shows that there is an alternative, coherent point of view
• the minority demonstrates certainty, confidence and commitment to this point of view
• the minority signals that it will not move or compromise
• the minority implies that the only solution to restore social stability and cognitive coherence is for the majority to shift towards the minority

References

1. Psychology: A New Introduction for A Level (2nd edition), Gross et al : P 133-135

1. The Stanford Prison Experiment
2. The Stanford Prison Experiment - Still powerful after all these years
3. Social Influence - Minority influence

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