Ch 8- Social Notes - ch 8 PDF

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Conformity Conformity: A change in one’s behavior due to the real or imagined influence of other people. ! Informational Social Influence (ISI): the need to know what's right • Informational Social Influence: Relying on other people as a source of information to guide our behavior; we conform because we believe that others’ interpretation of an ambiguous situation is correct and can help us choose an appropriate course of action. • Private Acceptance: Conforming to other people’s behavior out of a genuine belief that what they are doing or saying is right. • Public Compliance: Conforming to other people’s behavior publicly without necessarily believing in what the other people are doing or saying. • The researchers found that it makes you more susceptible. In the low-importance condition, participants conformed to the confederates’ judgments and gave the same wrong answers on just 35% of the critical! trials. • In the high-importance condition, participants conformed to the confederates’ judgments on 51% of the critical trials. ! When will people conform to ISI? • When the situation is ambiguous • When the situation is a crisis • When other people are experts ! A late-nineteenth-century social scientist Gustav Le Bon (1895) was the first researcher to document how emotions and behavior can spread rapidly through a crowd—an effect he called contagion. ! Normative Social Influence: the need to be accepted • Social Norms: The implicit or explicit rules a group has for the acceptable behaviors, values, and beliefs of its members. • Normative Social Influence: Going along with what other people do in order to be liked and accepted by them; we publicly conform with the group’s beliefs and behaviors but do not always privately accept them. • Asch Line StudySeventy-six percent of the participants conformed and gave an obviously incorrect ◦ response on at least one trial. People conformed on about one-third of the trials on which the accomplices gave an ◦ incorrect answer. • Normative pressures usually result in public compliance without private acceptance. ! When will people conform to NSI? Social Impact Theory: The idea that conforming to social influence depends on the group’s importance, immediacy, and the number of people in the group. • Strength: How important to you is the group? • Immediacy: How close is the group to you in space and time during the attempt to influence you? • Number: How many people are in the group? As the size of the group increases, so does the normative pressure it exerts, but each ◦ additional person has less of an influencing effect—going from three people to four makes much more of a difference than going from 53 people to 54. If we feel pressure

from a group to conform, adding another person to the majority makes a much bigger difference if the group is small rather than large. once the group reaches four or five other people, conformity does not increase much.

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◦ ! Idiosyncrasy Credits: The tolerance a person earns, over time, by conforming to group norms; if enough credits are earned, the person can, on occasion, deviate from the group without retribution

! Minority Influence • Minority Influence: The case where a minority of group members influences the behavior or beliefs of the majority. ! Role of Norms • Injunctive Norms: People’s perceptions of what behaviors are approved or disapproved of by others. • Descriptive Norms: People’s perceptions of how people actually behave in given situations, regardless of whether the behavior is approved or disapproved of by others. • Boomerang EffectFinding out peers do something more than you will cause you to increase doing it so you ◦ are also average.! ! Other tactics of Social Influence • Ask someone to do something small before asking them to do something big later • Foot-in-the-Door Technique: Social influence strategy in which getting people to agree first to a small request makes them more likely to agree later to a second, larger request. • Door-in-the-Face Technique: Social influence strategy in which first asking people for a large request that they will probably refuse makes them more likely to agree later to a second, smaller request. • Propaganda: A deliberate, systematic attempt to advance a cause by manipulating mass attitudes and behaviors, often through misleading or emotionally charged information. ! Obedience to Authority • NSI- hard to say no if someone really wants us to do something • ISI- using other people to define the situation • Conforming to the wrong norm • Self-justification...