Chapter 9: Social influence Flashcards
What is social influence?
The effects that other people can have on our thoughts, feelings and behaviours.
What is radicalization?
Type of social influence where people are encouraged to strike out at a society that they are led to believe is fundamentally wrong or immoral.
What is conformity?
The convergence of one’s thoughts, feelings and behaviours with an external standard.
What is compliance?
The process of doing as one is asked or as one is required to by regulations.
What is obedience?
The process of doing as one is told by an authority figure.
What are injunctive norms?
Norms that are perceived as being approved of by other people.
What is Sherif’s argument and theory of emergent group norms?
Because people have a basic need to feel that they are thinking and acting appropriately in social situations, they will probably use other people as frames of reference to guide their own thoughts and actions.
People also have a tendency to prefer moderate, or “average”, positions because they are the most frequent and are hence perceived as the most appropriate or correct.
Describe Sherif’s experiment with the autokinetic effect (moving lights) and how it supports emergent group norms.
Over 100 trials, groups of two or three quickly started to agree with each other, and responses converged, so that a group normative estimate evolved after a short number of trials.
The group members questioned the internal frame of reference they had developed earlier and instead used each others’ estimates to guide their own responses. So, gradually, a joint frame of reference was established, which informed future judgements.
Describe Asch’s study on conformity.
In the experimental group, where participants made their judgements alongside a group who gave clearly incorrect responses, approximately half the participants conformed to the group’s incorrect judgements in 6 or more of the crucial trials. Approximately 5% of the participants conformed to the erroneous group decision in all 12 key trials.
Describe Milgram’s study on obedience.
When asked to punish the “learner” with stronger and stronger electric shocks, 65% of participants complied fully and went all the way to 450 volts.
What is one significant suggestion based on Milgram’s obedience studies?
People’s attitudes often fail to determine their behaviour, especially when external influences override them. The experimental context had a greater influence on participants’ behaviour than their own wish to go no further.
Describe the Stanford prison experiment (Zimbardo).
24 men were selected and randomly assigned to prisoner or prison guard groups. The experiment had to be stopped because the prison guards’ behaviour quickly turned abusive. The theory is that the deindividuation of the prison guards enabled their behaviour.
What is deindividuation?
The tendency for people in groups, or people who are anonymous in some way, to abandon normal constraints on their behaviour and behave in a deregulated manner.
What is the difference between Milgram’s obedient participants and Zimbardo’s abusive prison guards?
In contrast to the reluctant, morally conflicted obedience of Milgram’s participants, Zimbardo’s guards applied initiative, creativity and even some enthusiasm to the tasks demanded by the roles they had been given.
What are the contextual factors of conformity?
Proximity of the experimenter, immediacy or emotional distance, dehumanization, authority of the situation, authority or status of the experimenter.
