Social Influence Research and Ethical Considerations - Assignment Example

Social Influence Research and Ethical Considerations Social Influence Research and Ethical Considerations 1.0. Introduction With social sciences, the major dedication is to understand the human condition. The scope of human condition involves the extent that the singular and shared conducts of human beings are comprehensible and predictable in social psychology. According to Fiske, Gilbert, Lindzey, & Jongsma (2010), social psychology attempts to comprehend behaviors, thoughts and feelings of individuals as influenced by imagined, actual, or implied presence of others. Social influence deals with the way social groups impact individual thoughts, feelings, and actions as evidenced by response behaivours like conformity, compliance, and obidience. Confirmity is well understood from the findings of the experiments by Asch and Sherif who subjected groups environments with social pressure and environments without social pressure and noted the difference in results. Milgram on the other hand proposed the agentic theory to investigate obidience to authority while Zimbardo’s prison evaluation experiment demostrated normative influence to investigate compliance. Today, the results of these experiments have had significant influence on the understanding of social influence (Kowalski & Westen, 2005). However, the experiements are also linked to ethical standard violations by the investigators for lack of informed concent from participants and the investigators’ ill intentions like Milgram. This paper evaluates the social influence research and ethical considerations. The aim is to understand studies and theories of social influence and the ethical issues that arise from the study of social behavior by psychologists. 1.1. Psychological explanations of a Social influence of human behavior During group interactions, Gilovich, Keltner, & Nisbett (2006) three types of social influence resulting are conformity, compliance, or obedience. Conformity Conformity involves changing ones behavior in order to fit into the surrounding social norms or fit into the perceived group pressure therefore freely involving in what others are doing (Gilovich, Keltner, & Nisbett, 2006). Muzafer Sherif’s experiment on autokinetic effect investigates conformity based on formation and perpetuation of group norms. In this experiment, a tiny single point of light in a dark room seemed to move since participants lacked a point reference and their eyes could not stabilize. When experimented individually, the estimates closely represented the estimate given in the group (Wren, 2013). From the study, conformity involves attributes of mindlessness and automation especially when group norms influence the perception individuals making them to behave much likely in the group way. Additionally, Gilovich, Keltner, & Nisbett (2006) highlight that based on Sherif (1936) experiment, participation by lone subjects revealed varied estimates that averaged closely to the group norm within the same environment. The interpretation of these results is that humans have higher conformity tendency in ambigous situations; when feeling insecure or incompetent; in an unanimous group; admire group status; and/or lack previous commtment to any response. Social influence does result to individuals conforming to the incorrect answer even if just once. The Solomon Asch Paradigm revealed that group norms were influenced by secret signals which the group uses to determine their answer even if it was wrong (Wren, 2013). By giving the wrong signal to a group of participants, Asch realized that only one innocent subject was willing to go against it. This kind of conformity is especially true where the tasks are difficult and ambigous, attraction to other group members, and gender with men being more independent than women. Asch and Sherif’s experiments revealed that the minority tended to conform to majority. However, Moscovici revealed that with time, the majority tend to generate private acceptance of the minority views’. The study results revealed that the majority in a group privately get converted and accept the view of the minority as correct and privately reject compliance to the majority’s views. Compliance In conformity studies, compliance is common since participants publicly do what they are asked by someone regardless of whether they are in authority or not. According to Hook, Franks, & Bauer (2011), people comply to gain favor or impres others as evidenced in Zimbardo’s experiment of Stanford Prison. In the experiment, role-playing exercise within a simulated prison life was used to investigate the readiness of people to conform to the roles of guards or prisoners. The results indicated that motivated by the need for rewards other than the threat of rejection, group pressure does not result to conformation since private opinion does not have to change (Wren, 2013). Therefore, for most of the participants, it was easy to conformto social roles particularly for stereotyped roles like prison guards. Compliance in this case revealed that while participating in various roles, people’s behaviors and attitude are shaped differently. Obidience Wren (2013) defines obidience as compliance to orders from a person in power. Stanley Milgram’s experiments to study difference between obidience to personal conscious and authority examined how far a person was willing to go to harm another while obeying instructions. The main interest for Milgram was to see how effortlessly people could be pressured to engage in atrocities. The result was that obidience engrained in humans depending on nurture detemined how likely one would follow orders from figures in authority even if it meant killing.This is evident especially when man merges his person into an organizational structure where the autonomous man is replaced with freedom from humane inhibition and only being mindful of authority sanctions (Wren, 2013). 1.2. Evaluation of contrasting research studies that explore social influence area of human behavior: social facilitation and social inhabitation According to Fiske, Gilbert, Lindzey, & Jongsma (2010), an individual’s conduct performance is inclined to the physical presence of others and the result could be social inhibition or social facilitation. Social inhibition refers to performance impairment while social facilitation refers to performance enhancement and both are because of the existence of others as either co-actors or observers. The major researches indicating social inhibition and facilitation were by Triplett (1898) who used naturalistic observational study and guarded experiment to discover social facilitation. Social facilitation was present in the fact that competitive cyclists raced faster than others were than against the clock. Investigation controlled experiment indicated that individual or group children spinning fishing wheel-like object had 50% supporting facilitation by performing faster in coactions situation, 25% similarly while 25% performed poorer despite being amidst others thereby presenting social inhibition effects (Higgins & Kruglanski, 2007). 2.1. Ethical issues which have arisen in social psychology Blass (1999) reveals that the performance of Milgram’s experiments was not ethical. Opponents criticized the fact that the experiments involved deception of participants and failed to inform the subjects about the experiment’s purpose. Particularly, Milgram failed to reveal that the learner was his confederate and that no real person was being shocked although Milgram insisted that illusion was essential for the experiment. Additionally, participants’ protection remained uncertain since exposure involved traumatic situations likely to cause psychological harm. For instance, some participants had seizures, others pleaded for permission to stop, and others noticeably distressed and Milgram said that was just for a short time. The indication is that Milgram had not informed consent from participants since that could mean very few, if any, could be willing to participate (Knud, Reidar, & Kee, 2008). Like Milgram, Zimbardo’s experiments caused great distress to volunteers and this showed lack of fully informed consent. In this study, the situation of the experiment reveals having more power than the person’s behavior especially since neither Zimbardo nor the participant knew the expected results for the experiment (Cardwell & Flagnan, 2003). Additionally, most volunteers lacked protection from any arising harm psychologically and physically. For instance, one of the prisoners had become uncontrollable and resulted to burst of screaming and was set free after 36 hours. This was possible since participants in Milgram’s experiment had the right to withdraw in case of any difficulties. Like in Zimbardo’s and Milgram’s experiments, Asch did not protect participants from any distress that could affect them psychologically. Further, deception like in Milgram’s experiment forced the students to participate in a “Vision Test” while being tested for naivety to conform to group norms. Criticism on Moscivici’s experiment reveals bias in the participant’s sample and size of the sample. Bias in the sample was due to an all women group with only four participants. The outcome of such a group could was unrepresentative. 2.2. Analyses of whether the understanding gained by such research outweighs the psychological harm caused to the participants In contrast to Zimbardo’s prison experiment, the formation of Milgram’s study involved pure deception since participants were only aware of being part of a learning and memory study (Hijazi, 2008). However, Milgram’s study revealed that obligation of the experimenter is a significant factor during the determination of obedience levels. Additionally, the fact that most of the subjects in Milgram’s study developed induced stress conducts during the experiment was essential in rationalizing the outstanding nature of the participants during the experiment and in reality (Hijazi, 2008). Conversely, the fact that the prisoners in Zimbardo’s prison experiment became passive, submissive through acquired helplessness resulted to their submission to the penal system, and the regulations enforced in it. From the two experiments, power of rules to shape human reality, and the enforcement methods used are crucial. Firsts, rules are a significant element of daily lives like in controlling traffic lights hence result into a simple but efficient complex-behavior control method. From Asch’s experiment, two reasons of conformity arise and these are normative influence for reasons of fitting into a group, and informational influence for reasons of the group’s more information compared to the individual. Sherif concluded that when in ambiguous situations, people always look at others for guidance since their will do right is limited to lack of information. 2.0. Conclusion The discussion in this paper has analyzed various studies and theories in social influence to reveal the pressure on human behavior by social surroundings that result to affecting individual’s behaviors. Social influence on behavior could be in the form of obedience, compliance, or conformity. Yielding to social influence could result to social inhibition or to social facilitation. In social facilitation, there is performance reinforcement that implies that the presence of others in our surroundings result to motivation to higher performance. Conversely, social inhibition implies that the presence of others in a given situation lowers motivation and they end up performing worse than when alone. Consequently, it is apparent that sometimes, yielding to social influence results to proper and correct decisions and acquisition of social approval. Although compliance and obedience aspects in social influence are because of among others, Milgram’s and Zimbardo’s studies, the negative impacts they had on participants are not negligible. As a result, psychology researchers have to ethical standards especially when dealing with human participants. However, the current application of findings on power of rules has continuously made life easier like in traffic lights control and formulation of numerous policies and laws that affect the day-to-day lives of people. References Blass, T. (1999). Obedience to Authority: Current Perspectives on the Milgram Paradigm. New York: Psychology Press. Cardwell, M., & Flagnan, C. (2003). Psychology AS: The Complete Companion. New York: Nelson Thornes. Fiske, S. T., Gilbert, T. D., Lindzey, G., & Jongsma, A. E. (2010). Handbook of social psychology. Hoboken, N.J.: John Willey & Sons. Gilovich, T., Keltner, D., & Nisbett, R. E. (2006). Social Influence. In T. Gilovich, D. Keltner, & R. E. Nisbett, Social Psychology (pp. xxx-xxx). United States of America: W.W. Norton & Company. Higgins, E. T., & Kruglanski, A. W. (2007). Social psychology : handbook of basic principles. New York: Guilford Press. Hijazi, H. (2008). Compare and contrast Milgrams Study of Obidience and Zimbardos Standford Prison Experiment with particular attention to the conflicting nature of Compliance and Obidience. Retrieved from University of Essex: http://www.essex.ac.uk/sociology/documents/pdf/ug_journal/vol1/2008SC213_HishamHijazi.pdf Hook, D., Franks, B., & Bauer, M. W. (2011). The social psychology of communication. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire ; New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Knud, L., Reidar, O., & Kee, V. D. (2008). Being Human Relationships and You: a Social Psychological Analysis. United States: Purdue University Press. Kowalski, R., & Westen, D. (2005). Psychology. New York: John Willey & Sons. Wren, K. (2013). Social Influences. London: Routledge. Read More