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Not everyone conforms or obeys. A key part of the AQA specification asks you to explain why some people resist social influence when others do not. Two factors are examined: a situational factor, social support, and a dispositional factor, locus of control (Rotter, 1966). Understanding both — and how they interact — is essential for achieving top marks, because resistance is where the situational–dispositional debate that runs through conformity and obedience comes to a head.
Key Definition: Resistance to social influence refers to the ability of people to withstand the social pressure to conform to the majority or to obey authority.
This lesson covers the AQA Paper 1 Social Influence content on explanations of resistance to social influence, namely social support and locus of control. It builds directly on the conformity and obedience lessons: social support is grounded in Asch's unanimity variation and Milgram's disobedient-confederate variation, while locus of control is a dispositional personality dimension from Rotter (1966). You should be able to describe both explanations (AO1), apply them to scenarios involving resistance (AO2), and evaluate them with research evidence, considering reliability, validity, the spectrum nature of locus of control, and the interaction of situational and dispositional factors (AO3).
Social support is the presence of one or more other people who resist the pressure to conform or obey, which makes it easier for an individual to do the same. It is a situational explanation: it concerns a feature of the social environment, not the personality of the resister. Its power comes from two related mechanisms — breaking the unanimity of a conforming majority, and providing a model for disobedience to an authority.
Exam Tip: When discussing social support, always explain the mechanism — it is not simply that "having another person present helps". The key is that social support breaks unanimity (in conformity) or provides a model for disobedience (in obedience). Naming the mechanism is what earns the AO1 depth marks.
It is worth dwelling on why a single ally has such a disproportionate effect, because this is the conceptual heart of social support. In a unanimous majority, the lone individual faces a stark choice between agreeing with everyone else or being the sole person who deviates — a position that is psychologically uncomfortable because it risks ridicule and exclusion (the normative cost) and because it implies that everyone else is wrong (the informational cost). The moment even one other person dissents, both costs collapse: the individual is no longer the only deviant, so the social risk of standing out is shared, and the apparent consensus that "everyone agrees" is shattered, removing the informational reason to doubt one's own judgement. This is why the correctness of the ally is far less important than the mere fact of their dissent — the ally functions less as a source of the right answer and more as a liberator who demonstrates that disagreement with the majority is permissible. The same logic explains the obedience case: a disobedient confederate shows that defiance does not bring catastrophe, dismantling the assumption that the authority's orders are inescapable. Understanding social support as the removal of the unanimity that sustains pressure, rather than the simple addition of an ally, is what distinguishes a top-band explanation from a superficial one.
Julian Rotter (1966) proposed the concept of locus of control (LoC), which refers to the extent to which individuals believe they have personal control over events in their lives. Unlike social support, this is a dispositional explanation: it locates the cause of resistance inside the person's stable personality.
Key Definition: Locus of control is a personality dimension describing the degree to which people believe they — rather than external forces — control the outcomes in their lives. It runs along a continuum from high internal to high external.
graph LR
A["High Internal LoC<br/>(I control my outcomes)"] --- B["Most people<br/>(somewhere in the middle)"] --- C["High External LoC<br/>(luck/fate/others control my outcomes)"]
| Internal LoC | External LoC |
|---|---|
| Believe they are responsible for what happens to them | Believe things happen because of external factors (luck, fate, powerful others) |
| More likely to seek out information and make independent decisions | More likely to be passive and accept the influence of others |
| Higher self-efficacy and self-confidence; base decisions on their own judgement | Lower sense of personal control; less self-confident |
| Less in need of social approval, so better able to resist conformity and obedience | More reliant on the approval of others, so more likely to conform and obey |
The theoretical link to resistance is that people with a high internal LoC take personal responsibility for their actions, base decisions on their own beliefs rather than others' expectations, and tend to have higher self-confidence and lower need for social approval — all of which make them better equipped to withstand both normative and informational pressure.
Rotter developed a 29-item forced-choice questionnaire to measure LoC. Respondents choose, from each pair, the statement they more strongly agree with. For example:
The number of external choices gives the LoC score, with a higher score indicating a more external orientation. It is essential to remember LoC is a continuum, not a dichotomy — most people sit somewhere in the middle, and only those toward the extremes show markedly different behaviour.
The link between an internal locus of control and resistance is not arbitrary; it follows from several connected characteristics of internally controlled individuals. First, because internals believe their own actions determine outcomes, they take personal responsibility for what they do — and a person who feels responsible for an unethical act is less able to comfortably enter Milgram's agentic state, in which responsibility is displaced onto an authority. Second, internals tend to be more active information seekers: they gather information and form their own judgements rather than relying on others to define the situation, which makes them less susceptible to informational social influence. Third, internals typically have higher self-confidence and self-efficacy, so they are more willing to trust their own perception against a contradicting majority, reducing the bite of normative pressure. Fourth, internals appear to have a lower need for social approval, so the prospect of disapproval — the engine of normative social influence — is less threatening to them. Taken together, these features explain why a high internal LoC predicts greater resistance to both conformity and obedience: the personality dimension works against the very psychological levers (responsibility-displacement, uncertainty, fear of rejection) that social influence relies upon. Articulating this mechanism, rather than merely asserting that "internals resist more", is the mark of a developed AO1 account.
A clear strength of the social support explanation is that it rests on well-controlled experimental evidence in which an ally was deliberately introduced and resistance reliably increased. In Asch's research a single dissenter cut conformity from 37% to 5.5%, and in Milgram's research disobedient confederates cut obedience from 65% to 10%. Because these were manipulated variables in controlled conditions, we can be confident the ally caused the rise in resistance rather than it being coincidental. The implication is that social support is not merely a plausible idea but a demonstrated cause of resistance, which gives the explanation strong internal validity and makes it directly usable in real interventions.
A limitation is that social support appears to provide only temporary resistance. In Asch's study, when the dissenting confederate abandoned their dissent part-way through, conformity climbed back toward the original level. This matters because it suggests the resister has not undergone a lasting change in independence; rather, they lean on the continued presence of an ally. In real life, an ally may withdraw support under social pressure or face costs (ridicule, exclusion) that the laboratory does not capture, so the protective effect may be less reliable outside controlled settings. The implication is that social support can trigger resistance but may not sustain it without reinforcement, limiting its real-world dependability.
The locus of control explanation is supported by converging evidence: Holland (1967) found internals more resistant in a Milgram-style procedure, and Avtgis's (1998) meta-analysis confirmed the LoC–conformity relationship across many studies, increasing confidence in the finding's reliability. However, almost all of this evidence is correlational — it shows internals tend to resist more, but it cannot establish that internal LoC causes resistance. A third variable, such as self-esteem, intelligence or education, might drive both an internal orientation and the tendency to resist. The implication is that, although the association is robust, the causal claim at the heart of the explanation remains unproven, which weakens its explanatory force.
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