Social Influence
Conformity
• Adjusting one’s
behavior or
thinking to
coincide with a
group standard.
How did you feel the
first time someone
asked you to smoke?
Asch’s Study
Conditions that Strengthen
Conformity
•
•
•
•
•
•
One is made to feel incompetent
The group is at least three people
The group is unanimous
One admires the group’s status
One had made no prior commitment
The person is observed
Reasons for Conforming
Normative Social
Influence
• Influence resulting
from a person’s
desire to gain
approval or avoid
disappointment
Informational Social
Influence
• Influence resulting
from one’s
willingness to accept
others’ opinions
about reality
Obedience
Milgram’s Experiments
Milgram’s Obedience Study
What did we learn from Asch &
Milgram?
• Ordinary people can do shocking things.
Group Influence on Behavior
Lets look at how groups effect our behavior.
Social Facilitation
• Improved performance of tasks in the
presence of others.
•Occurs with simple or well learned tasks.
•Not with tasks that are difficult or not yet
mastered.
Yerkes- Dodson Law
• There is an optimal
level of arousal for
the best performance
of any task:
• easy tasks-relatively high
• difficult tasks--low
arousal
• other tasks-moderate level
Social Loafing
• The tendency for
people in a group
to exert less
effort when
pooling efforts
toward a common
goal than if they
were individually
accountable.
Deindividuation
• The loss of self-awareness and selfrestraint occurring in group situations
that foster arousal and anonymity.
Group Polarization
• The concept that
a group’s attitude
is one of
extremes and
rarely moderate.
As a group, both the Black
Panthers and the Ku Klux
Klan are more extreme
than the average
individual in the group.
Group Polarization
Groupthink
• The mode of
thinking that occurs
when the desire for
harmony in a
decision-making
group overrides
common sense.
How could the hazing incident at
Northbrook High School be an example of
groupthink?
We also influence ourselves
The Power of the Individual
can be stronger than a group.
Self-Fulfilling Prophecies
• Occurs when one
person’s belief
about others
leads one to act in
ways that induce
the others to
appear to confirm
the belief.
If you think someone finds you attractive,
they more likely will!!!