Social Influence & Atrocity Flashcards
Social Influence
• influence of others on you
Conformity
Someone changes their perception, opinion & behaviors in ways that are consistent with group norms
- Compliance
- Acceptance
Compliance
- Conformity that involves publicly acting or going along with others, while privately disagreeing
- ex: you are new at work & everybody is going to applebees & you hate applebees, but go anyway to conform with the group norm
Acceptance
• Conformity that involves both going along AND privately agreeing
Why do we conform?
- Normative influence
* Informational Influence
Normative influence
- to be liked or accepted by others
* ex: smoke in the room experiment
Informative influence
• to solve uncertainty & get info about what is the right thing to do
What increases informational influence?
- Crisis (ex: 9/11)
- When others are experts
- When being accurate is important
Emotional Contagion in Groups
- Transfer of moods and emotions among ppl in groups or in group settings.
- positive: sports, happiness in friendship groups.
- negative: anxiety, negative thoughts at work
Groupthink: “going along to get along”
- Mode of thinking
- don’t really aim for the best decision
- desire for harmony, agreement & don’t want to rock the boat.
What are the characteristics of group thinks?
- feeling of invulnerability
- tendency to ignore/discredit info
- stress from external threats
- influential leader
- self-censorship (deciding out of fear)
- isolation from outside influences`
Social Roles: Zimbardo Experiment
- shared expectations about how a person who occupies a particular position is supposed to behave or act
- Results: guards become abusive, prisoners became passive & withdrawn.
Leadership Obedience
Complying with a direct command from an authority figure
Milgrim’s Shock experiment
- “how we respond to authority:
- results: 65% went all the way to the end
- shows power of the situation
Reasons for obedience
- Socialized to follow order
- Informational social influence
- Self-consistency (if you already started, might as well finish)
- Doing bad for, “good” reason
Public conformity
Superficial change done publicly
Private conformity
Chance of belief that occurs privately
Idiosyncrasy Credit
• “credit” person earns by following group norms
Transactive Memory
• shared system to remember • for success: 1. Trust 2. Division of knowledge 3. Effort 4. Know who knows what 5. Communication
Social Dilemma
• Good for one, bad for everybody else
Group polorization
• exaggerations of tendencies in “group think”
Biased Sampling
• spending more time sharing known info, rather than spending more time sharing UNKNOWN info
Social impact theory
- Strength (how important the ppl are)
- Immediacy (how close you are to the ppl)
- # of people: how many ppl are in the group
Genocide
• Deliberate & systematic destruction of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group
Internal bystanders
• Within the population that act like everything is normal, ignore the violence & often participate in discriminating against the victims
External bystanders
- outside groups looking in
- typically remain passive
- use minimal intervention
5 steps to inhumanity via IDENTITY
- Create an in-group
- Exclusion, exclude out group
- Threat, place out group as threat
- Virtue, represent the ingroup as GOOD
- Celebration, celebrate inhumanity as defense of heroism
Milgram defense
Results of the study made the study unethical
Ethics & The Institutional Review Board
- Participants should be treated with care and respect
* Researchers must tell the participants what they are getting into
