Hook65% of ordinary people delivered a lethal shock
In 1963, at Yale, Stanley Milgram told 40 ordinary men they were helping study how punishment affects learning. An actor in the next room played 'the learner'. Every time the learner got a word-pair wrong, the participant was ordered to deliver a stronger electric shock — 15 volts higher each time, up to a switch marked 450 volts and 'XXX'. The learner (unwired, unhurt) screamed, begged, complained of a heart condition, then fell silent. And 65% of participants — 26 of 40 — went all the way to 450 volts, prodded by nothing more than a calm man in a lab coat saying 'the experiment requires that you continue'.
Milgram had surveyed psychiatrists beforehand: they predicted fewer than 1% would obey. That gap between what we think we would do and what we actually do is this topic. Social influence is the study of how the real, imagined or implied presence of others changes what we think and do — from the quiet drift of conformity to the sharp edge of destructive obedience, and, crucially for the marks, to how a stubborn minority can flip a majority and remake a society. Every question here asks the same underlying thing: whose behaviour changed, why, and how much?
ModelThree flavours of conformity — and the two forces behind them
Kelman identified three depths of conformity. Compliance is the shallowest: you change your public behaviour but not your private view, and you stop as soon as the group is gone — laughing at a joke you did not find funny. Identification is in the middle: you adopt a group's behaviour because you value belonging to it, so it can be genuine but temporary — a new recruit dressing and talking like the team. Internalisation is the deepest: you truly accept the belief as your own, so it is private and lasting — converting to a friend's religion because you now believe it.
Two explanations drive this. Normative social influence (NSI) is conforming to be liked and accepted; it is emotional, springs from the human need for approval, and typically produces compliance — strongest in front of strangers or when getting it wrong would be embarrassing. Informational social influence (ISI) is conforming to be right; it operates when a situation is ambiguous or we lack the knowledge to judge, and because we come to believe the group, it typically produces internalisation. NSI explains why people gave answers they knew were wrong in Asch's study; ISI explains why conformity rose when he made the lines harder to judge.
CaseAsch's lines — how small changes swing the crowd
Asch (1951) sat one genuine participant among confederates and asked them to say aloud which of three comparison lines matched a standard line. The answer was obvious. Yet on 12 of 18 'critical' trials the confederates all gave the same wrong answer, and the real participant conformed on 36.8% of them; 75% conformed at least once, while 25% never caved. The value of the study is the variables Asch then manipulated. Group size: with one confederate conformity was near zero, with two around 13%, and with three it jumped to about 32% — after which adding more made little difference, so a majority of three is roughly enough. Unanimity: a single dissenter, even one giving a different wrong answer, cut conformity to under a quarter of its level (about 5.5%), because breaking the group's united front frees the individual. Task difficulty: making the lines more similar raised conformity, since ambiguity triggers ISI.
Used for evaluation, Asch is a 'child of its time': Perrin and Spencer (1980) found almost no conformity among UK engineering students in a less conformist era, and the sample of American male students plus the trivial task limit how far the findings generalise.
CaseZimbardo's basement — when the role eats the person
Milgram showed obedience to orders; Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment (1971) showed conformity to social roles. Twenty-four stable, screened male volunteers were randomly assigned to be guards or prisoners in a mock prison in the Stanford psychology basement. Prisoners were 'arrested' at home, deloused, stripped of their names and given numbers and smocks; guards were handed uniforms, mirrored sunglasses and batons. Within days the guards grew cruel and the prisoners passive, anxious and depressed. The study, planned for 14 days, was halted after just 6. Zimbardo's conclusion was that people slip into social roles readily when the situation is powerful enough — a mix of deindividuation and the setting overriding disposition.
The evaluation writes itself for AO3: only about a third of guards were genuinely brutal, hinting that disposition still mattered; Reicher and Haslam's 2006 BBC replication produced very different dynamics (the prisoners took control); and demand characteristics and serious ethical breaches cloud the findings.
MechanismObedience — Milgram's variables and the two-part explanation
Milgram then varied the situation to find what raised or lowered obedience. Proximity: moving the learner into the same room dropped obedience from 65% to 40%; making the teacher press the learner's hand onto a shock plate dropped it to 30%; and when the experimenter gave orders by telephone, obedience fell to about 21% (some participants even lied and gave weaker shocks). Location: shifting the study from prestigious Yale to a run-down office in Bridgeport cut obedience to 47.5%. Uniform: the experimenter's grey lab coat carried authority — Bickman (1974) showed a confederate dressed as a security guard was obeyed far more than one in a jacket and tie.
Two explanations account for this. In the agentic state, a person stops seeing themselves as acting on their own will and instead as an agent carrying out an authority figure's wishes, so they feel no personal responsibility; the shift from the autonomous state to this agentic state is held in place by binding factors. Legitimacy of authority is the idea that we hand power to people we perceive as socially sanctioned to hold it — learned from childhood — and the more legitimate and institutional the authority (Yale, a uniform), the stronger the obedience. Destructive authority explains how ordinary people carry out atrocities.
A strong 8-mark answer on situational variables reads like this: 'Milgram found that reducing the proximity between teacher and learner increased obedience: in the baseline study, where they were in separate rooms, 65% delivered the maximum 450 volts, but when the participant had to force the learner's hand onto the shock plate, obedience fell to 30%. This supports the idea that distance lets the participant remain in an agentic state, because the consequences of their actions are buffered and easier to deny. However, situational variables cannot be the whole story, because roughly a third still obeyed fully even at close proximity, which suggests dispositional factors such as the authoritarian personality also play a role.' Notice the moves the mark scheme rewards. The AO1 sentence names the study, the exact manipulation and a figure (30%), not just 'obedience went down'. The AO3 does not stop at 'this shows the agentic state' — it explains the mechanism (buffering, denial of consequences) and then adds a counter-argument that opens the door to a second explanation, turning a single point into a line of argument. That elaboration — point, evidence, why it matters, so what — is the difference between a Level 2 and a Level 4 evaluation.
ModelThe obedient personality — Adorno's authoritarian type
Not everyone obeys equally, which is where the dispositional explanation comes in. Adorno et al. (1950) studied over 2,000 middle-class white Americans and built the F-scale (the 'potential for fascism' scale). People who scored high showed the authoritarian personality: rigid, black-and-white thinking, extreme deference to those above them, contempt for those they saw as beneath them, and a fixation on in-groups and out-groups. Adorno traced its roots to a harsh, conditional upbringing — the child cannot express hostility to strict parents, so it is displaced onto safer targets (scapegoating). Elms and Milgram (1966) added weight: participants who had been fully obedient in Milgram's study scored higher on the F-scale.
For evaluation, the link is only correlational — a high F-scale score does not prove the personality caused the obedience — and the theory struggles to explain whole populations obeying, since not every German in the 1930s shared one personality type (a social-identity account fits mass obedience better). The F-scale also suffers from acquiescence bias, as agreeing with everything inflates the score.
MechanismSaying no — social support and locus of control
People also resist, and the spec wants two explanations. Social support: a single disobedient or non-conforming ally shatters the pressure. In Asch, one dissenter cut conformity dramatically; in a Milgram variation, two disobedient confederate 'teachers' dropped obedience to just 10%. The ally does not even have to be correct — they simply prove that independence is possible and give the individual a model to follow. Locus of control (Rotter, 1966) is a personality dimension running from internal to external. People with an internal locus believe they control their own outcomes; those with an external locus believe fate, luck or powerful others do. Internals resist more easily because they take personal responsibility, tend to be more self-confident and are more achievement-oriented — Holland (1967) found internals more likely to resist in a Milgram-style task.
Evaluation: locus of control mainly matters in new situations, and Twenge et al. reported that people have become more external over decades while also becoming more resistant to authority — the opposite of what the theory predicts, which weakens the link.
CaseThe stubborn few — minority influence
Majorities usually win through NSI, but a committed minority can convert a majority through deeper, private change. Moscovici (1969) showed this with blue-green slides: groups judged the colour of slides that were all blue but varied in brightness. When a consistent minority of two confederates called them 'green', genuine participants agreed on 8.42% of trials; when the minority was inconsistent (green only two-thirds of the time), agreement collapsed to 1.25%. Three behaviours make a minority persuasive. Consistency — agreement within the group and over time — makes the majority stop and reconsider. Commitment works through the augmentation principle: a minority who take risks or make sacrifices for their view are taken more seriously. Flexibility matters because rigid, dogmatic minorities are dismissed — Nemeth argued the minority must balance consistency with a willingness to negotiate.
The process is conversion: unlike majority compliance, the majority genuinely internalises the new view, often privately and after a delay, which then spreads through the 'snowball effect'.
CaseHow societies change — from minority to norm
Social change happens when the processes above scale up. The sequence examiners want: a minority draws attention to an issue (suffragettes chaining themselves to railings, civil-rights marches), shows consistency, and prompts deeper processing in people who had never questioned the status quo. The augmentation principle kicks in as the minority accepts risk, then the snowball effect gathers momentum until the once-radical view becomes the majority position — after which social cryptomnesia sets in: society remembers that things changed but forgets who forced the change. Normative influence drives change too, which is why 'social norms interventions' — telling people that most others already recycle, or drink less than they assume — can shift behaviour on binge drinking or energy use.
Real examples span gay rights, environmentalism and the way drink-driving became socially unacceptable. For AO3, change is typically slow and can trigger a backlash, and minorities are easily written off as 'deviant', which limits how far their influence reaches.
VocabularyKey terms the mark scheme pays for
TrapsMisconceptions that cost marks
ExamWhat examiners want
AQA marks three assessment objectives: AO1 (describe what you know), AO2 (apply it to the scenario in the stem) and AO3 (evaluate). The 16-mark essays split 6 marks AO1 and 10 marks AO3, so evaluation is where the grade is won. For AO1, never write a bare claim like 'Asch found people conform' — name the researcher, the manipulation and a figure (36.8%, 65%, 8.42%), then the conclusion. Precise numbers signal that you understand the spectrum, not just the headline.
For AO3, avoid the 'point-and-run' trap of stating a limitation and moving on. Elaborate every evaluation into a line of argument: point, evidence, why it matters, and the consequence for the theory (the 'so what'). The strongest closing move is often to pit a situational explanation against a dispositional one — obedience is not just the agentic state, because roughly a third obeyed even at close proximity, which points to the authoritarian personality. On application questions, you must lift specific details from the stem and name the process (NSI, ISI, agentic state, legitimacy of authority) that fits them; a scenario answer with no reference to the scenario is capped low no matter how much theory you write.