User:Atcovi/Spring2024/Social Psychology/Ch. 8

Most people confirm to conformity. This was studied by Solomon Asch.
 * Social Influence: Many ways in which people produce changes in others in the way they behave, their attitudes, or their own beliefs.

Factors that determine whether (or not) + intensity conformity occurs

 * Cohesiveness
 * Group Size
 * Type of social norm (descriptive [how much do we see of it?] vs. injunctive [what do other people think? what MUST and MUST NOT be done])

Motives that Underly Our Want to Conformity

 * 1) To be liked by others
 * 2) To be accurate

Rooted in normative and informational social influence. ("Normative influence involves an individual's desire to fit in a group despite their beliefs about the group's behavior ("hey, come smoke with us! don't be a jerk"). Informational social influence is what refers to the notion a person has that a group knows better than them or has more information than them.").

Emotional contagion = easily pick up emotions.

Factors that determine nonconformity (don't wanna "go along" with the crowd)

 * Zimbardo's study = effects of conformity are pressurizing.
 * When we don't know what we feel like, we may be more easily swayed.
 * High status, power and desire to be unique are reasons for people to reject conformity.
 * Normative Focus Theory - "Any given social norm will only influence behavior when it is activated at the moment of the behavioral decision"

Compliance

 * "Compliance": Getting others to say yes to various requests.
 * Foot-in-the-door technique (how small requests go to big, bad requests)
 * Lowball procedure
 * That's-not-all technique


 * Principle of reciprocity
 * Door-in-the-face
 * That's-not-all-techniques


 * Principle of scarcity
 * Playing hard to get
 * Deadline technique

Why destructive obedience?
 * Obedience = Social influence, one person orders 1+ others to do something and they listen. People will obey orders even from a weak person, regardless of harm or not (Stanley's research).
 * It's the authoritative figure's fault!
 * The norm: "Obey those in authority"
 * Commands slowly got so bad that they didn't even notice
 * "It happened so fast that we had no idea!"

How to reduce?
 * "You share responsibility"
 * "At some point, you gotta stop"
 * "Is this person supposed to be in power?"
 * "Hey y'all! Y'all gotta understand the psychology behind this!"

Unintentional influence takes place in different forms:
 * Emotional contagion
 * Symbolic social influence (work of our mind)
 * Modeling