Psych Notes: Social Influence

Conformity
-adjusting one's behavior or thinking to coincide with a group standard
-most conform because they don't want to be the odd one out

Reasons for Conforming
Normative Social Influence: Influence resulting from a person's desire to gain approval or avoid disappointment
Informational Social Influence: Influence resulting from one's willingness to accept other's opinions about reality
-Solomon Asch's Conformity Experiment: nearly 75% of participants went along with a group's decision that one of the shorter lines was actually the longest

He turns around because everyone else is doing it, even if it's unusual.

Obedience
-Stanley Milgram's Experiments: fake electric shocks to prove conformity
-proved that a majority (65% of the volunteers) would deliver the maximum voltage shock because of obedience to authority

• Each participant took the role of a "teacher" and delivered a shock to the "student" every time an incorrect answer was produced. The student is actually an actor in the experiment and is only pretending to be shocked.
• Proves: physical presence of the authority figure increases compliance

Group Influence on Behavior
Social Facilitation
-Improved performance of tasks in the presence of others
-Occurs with simple or well-learned tasks
-Not with tasks that are difficult or not yet mastered

Social Loafing
-the tendency for people in a group to exert less effort when pooling efforts toward a common goal than if they were individually accountable

Deindividuation
-the loss of self-awareness and self-restraint occurring in group situations that foster arousal and anonymity.
-ex: riots and mob mentality

Group Polarization
-the concept that a group's attitude is one of extremes and rarely moderate
-ex: as a group, both the Black Panthers and Ku Klux Klan are more extreme than the average individual in the group

Groupthink
-The mode of thinking that occurs when the desire for harmony in a decision-making group overrides common sense

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
-occurs when one person's belief about others leads one to act in ways that induce the others to appear to confirm the belief
-"Power of Positive Thinking"