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Social Psychology

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All the others were confederates who had been instructed to give incorrect ... he would hear most of the confederates incorrect responses before giving his own. ... – PowerPoint PPT presentation

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Title: Social Psychology


1
Explanations of criminal behaviour
  • Social Psychology

2
Social Psychology
  • Group Processes
  • Conformity
  • Asch 1956
  • Sheriff 1935
  • Non-conformity rejection
  • Deindividuation
  • Zimbardo 1969 and 1973

3
(No Transcript)
4
Asch 1956
5
Asch
  • Asch showed bars like those in the Figure to
    college students in groups of 8 to 10.
  • He told them he was studying visual perception
    and that their task was to decide which of the
    bars on the right was the same length as the one
    on the left.
  • Asch asked the students to give their answers
    aloud.
  • He repeated the procedure with 18 sets of bars.

6
Asch
  • Only one student in each group was a real
    subject. All the others were confederates who had
    been instructed to give incorrect answers on 12
    of the 18 trials.
  • Asch arranged for the real subject to be the
    next-to-the-last person in each group to announce
    his answer so that he would hear most of the
    confederates incorrect responses before giving
    his own.
  • Would he go along with the crowd?

7
Asch
  • To Asch's surprise, 37 of the 50 subjects
    conformed to the majority at least once, and 14
    of them conformed on more than 6 of the 12
    trials. When faced with a unanimous wrong answer
    by the other group members, the mean subject
    conformed on 4 of the 12 trials.

8
Asch
Who is the subject?
9
Sherif 1935
  • Sherif's experiment involved the so-called
    autokinetic effect whereby a point of light in an
    otherwise totally dark environment will appear to
    move randomly.
  • Subjects were invited to estimate the amount of
    'movement' they observed.

10
Sherif
  • They made their estimates in groups where each
    member could hear the others' estimates.
  • Ultimately, the group members' estimates
    converged on a middle-of-the-road 'group
    estimate'.

11
Non-conformity
  • Think about those who were not obedient in
    Milgram
  • And the few prisoners who did not conform in
    Zimbardos prison experiment
  • Can you have a conformity amongst
    non-conformists?

12
De-individuation Total loss of self identity -
becoming anonymous
  • Zimbardo 1969
  • In one study, participants were rendered
    anonymous by clothing them in oversized lab coats
    and hoods, compared with normal clothes and name
    tags in the control condition.
  • The participants' task was to shock a confederate
    in a situation similar to the classic Milgram
    studies on obedience.

13
De-individuation
  • Zimbardo 1969
  • Using groups of female students, Zimbardo
    demonstrated that anonymous participants shocked
    longer (and therefore more painfully) than
    identifiable participants, in confirmation of his
    theory.

14
De-individuation
  • Zimbardo 1973
  • Stanford University Prison Experiment
  • Is the behaviour dispositional or situational?

15
Key evaluation points
  • These social processes see the criminal as acting
    a social role within society and his behaviour
    being determined by situations, peer pressure and
    then attitude change leading to criminal
    behaviour.
  • If this is the explanation of criminal behaviour,
    why do the majority not end up criminal?
  • It does explain why they stay criminal while in
    the same social groups.

16
Key evaluation points
  • Methodological evaluation Most of the research
    is experimental therefore lacks ecological
    validity, has high demand characteristics, may
    show experimenter bias by the choice of activity
    for participants and the participants can only
    show a limited range of behaviour.
  • Can show cause and effect, is well controlled,
    careful sampling though usually university
    students and mostly male ( but so are criminals
    !! ).
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