9.3 Flashcards
Describe the chameleon effect.
This is the tendency of people to mimic other people’s bodily movements or gestures. Example: When one person yawns another person yawns. This was observed in a study that was observing students working together
Who first described the chameleon effect?
Tany Chartrand and John Bargh
Explain what social contagion is and provide an example
This is when behaviors and attitudes spread throughout a social group. For example when sitting with a group of friends one person starts complaining about how a teacher grades and by the end of lunch everyone is complaining about the grading practices
What is a confederate in an experiment?
A personwho is an aide of the experimenter and pretends to be aparticipant in the study or experiment. Throughout the study they give rehearsed behaviors
Describe the Asch line experiment
This experiment had people sit at a table to answer questions about what they saw. Everyone in the experiment was in on the experiment except for one volunteer. The people would view a line and then be asked to identify which answer looked most similar to the line they saw. At the start the confederates and volunteers gave correct answers. But as the experiment went on the confederates started to give wrong answers, which would cause the volunteer to sometimes give the wrong answer as well
Explain what Solomon Asch discovered in the Asch line experiments.
He discovered that people began to conform to the group that surrounds them. Since the confederates responded out loud first then when it was the volunteers turn, they would sometimes give the same answer that the others in the group did even though they knew it was the wrong answer.
Explain the difference between normative and informational social influence
Normative social influence is when an individual wants to fit in and be part of a group causing the person to conform. While informational social influence is when a person conforms to what others are doing because they might be more knowledgeable
Briefly describe Milgram’s obedience experiment.
Milgram had a confederate and participants “randomly” pick roles for the experiment. The confederate would be given the role of learner, while the participant would always be given the teacher role. (The participant did not know this) After the roles were assigned the two people would be brought to two different rooms. The person leading the experiment would tell the teacher to read a list of words to the learner and have them say the words back. If the learner got an answer wrong the teacher was to give the learner a shock, starting at low voltage and upping the volts each time they got a question wrong. The results of the experiment were that the teacher often would continue to shock the learner even when they were in clear distress and pain, just because the researcher would say to continue
Describe what this experiment showed about obedience.
Individuals are more likely to listen to an authority figure, even if what they are saying goes against their internal thinking (An example of cognitive dissonance)
Explain what happened in the stanford prison experiment.
24 different men were randomly assigned to either be a prisoner or a guard. The experiment took place in the basement of a building where the rooms and hallways had been transformed to look like a prison. The prisoners were put in the cells and the guards were told to keep order. Individuals in the experiment quickly took on their roles, prisoners started to think they really were in a prison and lost their identity and some of the guards started to become cruel to the prisoners. The experiment had to be stopped early due to the amount of stress that the participants in the experiment were experiencing
Describe what this experiment showed about obedience
Individuals will listen to people in power even when it is against their best interests. Prisoners in the experiment conformed to the guards demands and allowed the guards to take more of their freedoms away
Identify three problems with the stanford prison experiment
1) No control group 2) violated ethicalguidelines3) No experimental group
