Social Influence & Atrocity

Question 1

Social Influence

Answer 1

• influence of others on you

Question 2

Conformity

Answer 2

Someone changes their perception, opinion & behaviors in ways that are consistent with group norms

1. Compliance
2. Acceptance

Question 3

Compliance

Answer 3

• 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

Question 4

Acceptance

Answer 4

• Conformity that involves both going along AND privately agreeing

Question 5

Why do we conform?

Answer 5

• Normative influence

* Informational Influence

Question 6

Normative influence

Answer 6

• to be liked or accepted by others

* ex: smoke in the room experiment

Question 7

Informative influence

Answer 7

• to solve uncertainty & get info about what is the right thing to do

Question 8

What increases informational influence?

Answer 8

• Crisis (ex: 9/11)
• When others are experts
• When being accurate is important

Question 9

Emotional Contagion in Groups

Answer 9

• 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

Question 10

Groupthink: “going along to get along”

Answer 10

• Mode of thinking
• don’t really aim for the best decision
• desire for harmony, agreement & don’t want to rock the boat.

Question 11

What are the characteristics of group thinks?

Answer 11

• feeling of invulnerability
• tendency to ignore/discredit info
• stress from external threats
• influential leader
• self-censorship (deciding out of fear)
• isolation from outside influences`

Question 12

Social Roles: Zimbardo Experiment

Answer 12

• 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• Results: guards become abusive, prisoners became passive & withdrawn.

Question 13

Leadership Obedience

Answer 13

Complying with a direct command from an authority figure

Question 14

Milgrim’s Shock experiment

Answer 14

• “how we respond to authority:
• results: 65% went all the way to the end
• shows power of the situation

Question 15

Reasons for obedience

Answer 15

• Socialized to follow order
• Informational social influence
• Self-consistency (if you already started, might as well finish)
• Doing bad for, “good” reason

Question 16

Public conformity

Answer 16

Superficial change done publicly

Question 17

Private conformity

Answer 17

Chance of belief that occurs privately

Question 18

Idiosyncrasy Credit

Answer 18

• “credit” person earns by following group norms

Question 19

Transactive Memory

Answer 19

• shared system to remember
• for success:
1. Trust
2. Division of knowledge
3. Effort
4. Know who knows what
5. Communication

Question 20

Social Dilemma

Answer 20

• Good for one, bad for everybody else

Question 21

Group polorization

Answer 21

• exaggerations of tendencies in “group think”

Question 22

Biased Sampling

Answer 22

• spending more time sharing known info, rather than spending more time sharing UNKNOWN info

Question 23

Social impact theory

Answer 23

1. Strength (how important the ppl are)
2. Immediacy (how close you are to the ppl)
3. # of people: how many ppl are in the group

Question 24

Genocide

Answer 24

• Deliberate & systematic destruction of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group

Question 25

Internal bystanders

Answer 25

• Within the population that act like everything is normal, ignore the violence & often participate in discriminating against the victims

Question 26

External bystanders

Answer 26

• outside groups looking in
• typically remain passive
• use minimal intervention

Question 27

5 steps to inhumanity via IDENTITY

Answer 27

1. Create an in-group
2. Exclusion, exclude out group
3. Threat, place out group as threat
4. Virtue, represent the ingroup as GOOD
5. Celebration, celebrate inhumanity as defense of heroism

Question 28

Milgram defense

Answer 28

Results of the study made the study unethical

Question 29

Ethics & The Institutional Review Board

Answer 29

• Participants should be treated with care and respect

* Researchers must tell the participants what they are getting into