Compare and contrast normative influence and informational social influence. Which of these types of social influence played a bigger role in Sheriff's study (in which participants estimated how far a dot of light appeared to move)? Which played a bigger role in Asch's study (in which participants made judgments involving the lengths of lines)? Explain your answers
What will be an ideal response?
Normative social influence leads people to conform out of fear of the negative
consequences of appearing deviant. Indeed, to avoid standing out from the rest of the
group and risking embarrassment, individuals will often conform to the majority even if
they think the majority is wrong. Alternatively, informational social influence leads
people to conform when they believe others are correct in their judgments. In this case,
they conform to the majority because they assume that the relatively large number of
people holding a particular opinion or behaving in a particular way suggests that these
people are correct. The primary influence found in Sheriff's study was informational
because the situation was rather ambiguous for the participants. They could not be sure
how far the dot of light really moved, so they looked to the other participants to provide
information about the correct answers. Even when participants in Sheriff's study were
later asked to make the same judgments alone (where there would be little pressure
against deviating from a group norm), they continued to make judgments consistent
with the group norm? this suggests that the participants conformed to the group norm
because of the information provided earlier. In Asch's study, however, normative
influence played the bigger role. Here, the situation was not ambiguous? the correct
answers were obvious to the participants. Not needing the other people in the group to
provide them with answers that they already knew, the participants were not
particularly vulnerable to informational influence. Rather, Asch's participants were
concerned about deviating from the opinions expressed by a unanimous majority.
Indeed, when these participants were asked to write down their answers privately, their
levels of conformity dropped sharply.
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