Society, social issues and culture

1. A society carries shared expectations, called norms, about how people should treat one another, and social influence works by acting on those norms.

1. Social issues are problems that belong to the way a society works rather than to one individual.
2. Useful examples are prejudice and discrimination, anti-social behaviour by crowds, and strangers in trouble being walked past.

1. A single society can contain many cultures, so the two terms are not interchangeable.
2. Norms about helping a stranger, about who counts as an authority figure and about how a crowd should behave are all carried by culture.
3. Because those norms differ, a finding from one culture cannot be assumed to hold everywhere, and that is what psychologists call cultural bias.

Using social influence content to explain social issues

1. Conformity and obedience explain why a person goes along with a harmful norm or a harmful instruction instead of acting on their own judgement.
2. Deindividuation explains why people who feel anonymous in a crowd do things they would never do alone, which is the route into anti-social collective behaviour.
3. The bystander effect explains why someone in difficulty on a busy street can be passed by for a long time.

Using the two named studies as evidence

1. Piliavin et al (1969) is your evidence for a social issue about who gets helped, because passengers helped an ill white victim before 70 seconds in 52 of 57 trials but a drunk white victim in only 5 of 24, even though it was the same man on the floor.
2. That gives you a psychological explanation for why some people in difficulty are ignored, and it points at the perceived cost of helping as the thing a society would need to change.
3. Haney, Banks and Zimbardo (1973) is your evidence for social issues about power inside institutions, because men screened as normal and allocated to their roles at random produced escalating harm within days.
4. That has an obvious use, because it says reforming a role or a set of rules can change behaviour that would otherwise be blamed on bad individuals.

The samples in those studies are themselves a cultural issue

1. Both studies were run in the United States, one on a single stretch of the New York subway and one with 22 male volunteers recruited by advertisement in one American university town.
2. Neither sample represents the world, so their conclusions about helping and about roles may not transfer to societies with different norms.
3. The problem is sharper inside Piliavin et al, because the black victim conditions ran only 8 and 14 trials against 57 and 24 for the white victim, so any claim about the race of the victim rests on very few observations.

Turning this into marks

1. Give one accurate sentence when you are asked to define society, social issues or culture, because nothing beyond the definition is credited.
2. The mark most often lost is an answer that names deindividuation and names the crowd but never joins them, so always write the sentence that says why the concept explains the issue.
3. Reach for Piliavin et al or Haney, Banks and Zimbardo rather than research from elsewhere, and quote one figure from whichever you choose.