Chapter 9 Social Influence 1 Conformity adjusting your behavior based on what s considered normal in order to fit in or avoid potential ridicule Ex We wear certain clothes because that they fit in and are cool 2 Compliance Adjusting your behavior because you ve been asked to do something and have agreed to do it Behavior induced by an overt request Ex IF a stranger walked to you and asked you to give him 5 would you comply What if it was a police officer young child or pregnant women 3 Internalization adjusting your behavior based on information that helps you make a correct decision Becoming convinced of what is correct Ex If a brand of headphones are popular on campus than you might buy them because you believe that since everyone else has them they are in fact the best kind Normative and Informational Influences Normative Social Influence fundamental human need to belong to social groups Those groups have to have the same common beliefs values so they conform Making your decision solely on what other people are doing Asch s Line Study including effects of group size and non conformists o Group of people were shown lines on a card and asked which other line was the same size as the line being tested Even though the participant knew which one was the right sized line he chose the line that everyone else was picking because he didn t want to stick out o Initially 74 of the participants gave the wrong answer o The size of the group influences conformity a group of 3 or 4 offering the wrong answer is enough for the participant to say the wrong answer o When asked to do the experiment on their own in isolation the participants gave the right answer 100 of the time Informational Social Influence When we don t know how to behave we copy other people The other people are the information sources for how we are to behave Sherif s Autokenetic Effect Study o The Auto kinetic effect is when the participants are in a dark room with a laser that appears to be jumping up and down but in reality it is not moving o The participants started out seeing different amounts of movement but started to agree on how far the dot moved because they had been convinced by the other participants in the room o Didn t know how much the light was moving so they depend on others people information to base their answer Smoke Filled Room Study o The participants are in a room and it begins to smoke up but no one makes any rash moves o The participants assumed that because other people did not react then it means it is not a real emergency Both normative and informational Group Polarization what it is how it can be explained by each example of informational and normative influence o When groups of people start off with moderate attitudes and end up with extreme ones seem too moderate o Social comparison others in the group tend to make our own opinions o Informational others in the group provide new reasonable arguments that support your own opinion o Normative change your original stance to what the group believes is right in order to fit in Zimbardo Stanford Study Participants reenacted the grounds of a jail with them randomly assigned as a guard or as a prisoner It was to test what happens when the normal behavior ends up being behavior that is cruel and vulgar They had to end the study early because it got too extreme in that some of the people embraced the character entirely too much Demonstrated the powerful role that the situation can play in human behavior because the guards were placed in a position of power they began to behave in ways that they would not normally act in their everyday lives or in other situations o Di indivdual not being held responsible for your own actions Ex at a riot you are rioting with other people and maybe acting in a way that you normally don t however because you are with other people you are conforming to those actions Holfling did a study in a hospital to analyze the effect of authority on people He found that 21 out of the 22 workers listened and broke the rules to the doctor and administered a drug against hospital protocols Foot in the Door Asking for something little getting the person to agree and then asking for something bigger By lessening your request you are giving them something other people feel that they need to reciprocate so they help you out Ex Fraser and Freedman asked people to either sign a petition or place a small card in a window of their home about California safe driving Two weeks later the same people were asked again to put a large sign in their lawn and they saw that those same people complied as well Door in the Face asking something to do something big or little extreme and when they deny you scale it down to make a better offer and get them to agree Ex will you drive me to Philly tomorrow No Okay will you at least drive me to the train station Bystander Effect Role of informational influence from other bystanders if they don t react like it is an emergency then it must not be one Kitty Genvose died because everyone else assumed that someone was helping Kitty and that they didn t have to join in Informational influence informational helps provide us in how to act since in the video of Kitty no one was acting nervous no one did anything Diffusion of Responsibility responsibility is not illicitly assigned Attributions process of assigning a cause to an event An interference about the cause of a behavior We tend to explain our own behavior and the behavior of others by assigning attributes to these behaviors Situational external something going on outside of yourself o After doing poorly on an exam I am likely to make a self serving bias attribution to an external cause Dispositional internal attributing a behavior based on someone s internal characteristics someone s personality Fundamental Attribution Error Overestimate the internal and underestimate the external facts Prefer internal attributions Our tendency to pay more attention to the situation rather than to the individual and is true when we know little about the other person Referring to other people Attributing factors to other people we would blame it on their internal attribution Ex You get cut off in the car and you say what an idiot an internal factor Rather than saying She must be having a bad day which would be an external factor Self Serving Bias We tend to equate success to internal and failures to external attributes Ex You get a promotion at work you equate it to your hard work
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