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A-Level Psychology Practice: Social Influence

A-Level Psychology Practice — Social Influence

18 MCQ practice problems on social influence. Select an answer, submit, and review the explanation. Questions follow A-Level examination style (AQA specification) and cover conformity, obedience, resistance to social influence, minority influence, social change, and crowd psychology.

What These Questions Test

These problems test your understanding of how social situations influence individual behaviour, the key studies in the field, and the ability to apply social influence theories to real-world scenarios.

Typical question types:

  • Conformity: Asch’s line study (majority influence, conformity rates ~37%). Types: compliance (public conformity, private disagreement), identification (conforming to be like the majority), internalisation (genuine acceptance of the majority view). Variables: group size, unanimity, task difficulty.
  • Obedience: Milgram’s electric shock study (65% obedient to 450V). Agentic state (seeing oneself as an agent of authority) vs autonomous state. Authority factors: proximity, location, uniform. Legitimacy of authority.
  • Resistance to social influence: Social support (Asch: a dissenter reduced conformity). Locus of control (Rotter: internal LOC more resistant). Autonomy (Milgram: variations showed resistance when authority was remote).
  • Minority influence: Moscovici’s blue slide study. Consistency, commitment, and flexibility are key. The conversion effect: minorities can cause genuine change in the majority. Difficulties: minorities can be seen as eccentric or deviant.
  • Social change: How minorities become majorities. Snowballing (growing support). Conversion (genuine change of heart). Leniency effect (moderate minorities are more influential). Social cryptoamnesia (the original minority is forgotten).

Approach Strategy

  1. Know the key studies inside out. For each study, know the aim, method, results, and conclusions. Also know the ethical and methodological criticisms.
  2. Distinguish compliance, identification, and internalisation. This is a common exam question. Compliance is superficial; identification is role-based; internalisation is deep and lasting.
  3. Apply to real-world examples. Show how social influence theory explains real phenomena: propaganda, social movements, cult recruitment, peer pressure.
  4. Evaluate using strengths and weaknesses. Lab experiments (high control, low ecological validity). Field studies (high ecological validity, low control). Cross-cultural research (generalisability).

Intuition

Social influence is about the tension between fitting in and standing out. Humans are social animals — we have evolved to cooperate and conform because in our evolutionary past, being part of a group was essential for survival. But sometimes conformity leads us to do things we know are wrong (Asch’s participants knew the answer but went along with the majority).

Obedience is about the relationship between authority and obedience. Milgram showed that ordinary people can do terrible things when instructed by a legitimate authority. The key mechanism is the agentic shift: people stop seeing themselves as responsible for their own actions and instead see themselves as agents of the authority figure.

Common Mistakes

  1. Confusing conformity and obedience. Conformity is going along with peers (no authority figure). Obedience is following an authority figure’s instructions. They involve different mechanisms and different research.
  2. Misrepresenting Milgram’s findings. Milgram did NOT show that “people are evil.” He showed that situational factors (proximity, uniform, legitimacy) can override personal morals. The point is about the power of the situation, not the character of the participants.
  3. Overlooking the role of social support. Asch found that having one dissenter (even one who gave wrong answers) dramatically reduced conformity. Social support is a key factor in resistance to influence.
  4. Confusing majority and minority influence. Majority influence in most cases produces compliance or identification. Minority influence in most cases produces internalisation (if it works at all). The processes are different.

Cross-References