- Social: Making people obey authority and socialising them into an agentic state from a young age. Knowledge of how to induce and reduce prejudice within individuals and groups. Can help to prevent blind obedience and manipulate obedience, ie positions of authority often identified by uniform.
- Cognitive: Memory research influential in the legal practise – eyewitness testimony not reliable because of reconstructive memory. Dictating who can testify and under what conditions it is accurate.
- Biological: Using knowledge of brain function to control individuals, such as Raine and aggression, could lead to unfair labelling and treatment. Chemical castration of males to block male hormones used with sex offenders. Prefrontal lobotomies used to control antisocial behaviour.
- Learning: Use of learning theories in therapy (ie ABA) can be social control, including issues of power of therapist which can be open to abuse in, for example, the token economy. Believe all behaviour can be shaped by environmental factors, essentially proposing behaviour can be manipulated and therefore subject to social control. Skinner suggested societies could be controlled by reinforcement.
- Clinical: Some argue that labelling behaviour as abnormal leads to diagnosis, therefore this forces people to conform and if they do not, they must receive treatment to normalise behaviour. However, many would argue that antipsychotic medication is critical for alleviating distress that comes with schizophrenia and enabling quality of life to be restored.
- Child: Attachment research enforces idea that mother should stay with child, women felt pressurised to give up jobs and stay at home. Restrictive. Many women feel pressurised to extend maternity leave or feel guilty about leaving child in non-maternal day-care.
