Social Influence

Conformity and Obedience

Group Influence
The Power of Individuals
 Social Influence

• The greatest contribution of social psychology is its

study of attitudes, beliefs, decisions, and actions, and
the way they are molded by social influence.

NON SEQUITER © 2000 Wiley. Dist. by Universal

Press Syndicate Reprinted with Permission
Social Influence
• Social influence comprises the ways in which individuals
change their behavior to meet the demands of a social
environment. It takes many forms and can be seen
in conformity, socialization, peer
pressure, obedience, leadership, persuasion, sales,
and marketing.

• Typically social influence results from a specific action,

command, or request, but people also alter their attitudes and
behaviors in response to what they perceive others might do
or think.
In 1958, Harvard psychologist Herbert Kelman identified
three broad varieties of social influence.

• Compliance is when people appear to agree with others

but actually keep their dissenting opinions private.

• Identification is when people are influenced by someone

who is liked and respected, such as a famous celebrity.

• Internalization is when people accept a belief or behavior

and agree both publicly and privately.
• Morton Deutsch and Harold Gerard described two
psychological needs that lead humans to conform to the
expectations of others.
1. (Informational social influence) : It describes a psychological
and social phenomenon wherein people copy the actions of others in
an attempt to undertake behavior in a given situation.

2. (Normative social influence): Normative social influence

involves a change in behaviour that is deemed necessary in order to
fit in a particular group. Normative influence is an influence to
conform to the positive expectations of others. In terms of Kelman's
typology, normative influence leads to public compliance, whereas
informational influence leads to private acceptance.
• Social psychology’s great lesson is that the enormous
power of social influence
• This influence can be seen in our:
• Conformity
• Obedience to authority
• Our group behavior
Conformity
and Obedience
Mood Linkage
Solomon Asch
Social Norms
Stanley Milgram
 Conformity & Obedience
• Behavior is contagious, modeled by one
followed by another.
• The need for a positive relationship with the
people around leads us to conformity
• We follow behavior of others to conform.

• Other behaviors may be an expression of

compliance (obedience) toward authority.

Conformity Obedience
 The Chameleon Effect
• The chameleon effect is our tendency to
unconsciously mimic those around us.
• Yawning when others yawn
• Picking up the mood of a happy or sad person

:
https://www.youtube.com/wat
ch?v=ioblgpA5eTo
• This automatic mimicry is an ingredient in our ability to
empathize with others.

• This helps explain why we feel happier around happy people

than around depressed people
Conformity
• Conformity is adjusting one’s behaviors or
thinking to coincide with a group standard
(Chartrand & Bargh, 1999).
• Conformity involves yielding to social pressure.

How did you

feel the first
time someone
asked you to
smoke?
• In the 1950s, Solomon Asch
showed that people have a
surprisingly strong tendency to
conform.
• He conducted a classic experiment
where subjects were asked to make
unambiguous judgments, indicating which
of three lines on a card matched an
original standard
• The task was easy, and 7 subjects were
asked one at a time to make their
judgments aloud. Only the 6th subject
was a real subject – the others were
confederates who, after a few trials,
began purposely giving wrong answers. The Asch Experiment
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYIh4Mkcf http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qA-
JA gbpt7Ts8
 Group Pressure and Conformity
• Asch wanted to see how often people conformed and
gave an answer they knew was wrong, just because
everyone else did. How often would someone be
influenced because they are willing to accept others’
opinions about reality?
• He found that, on average, about 1/3 (37%) conformed
completely; 70% conformed at least once. However,
there was considerable variability among subjects (some
never caved at all).
Conditions that Strengthen
Conformity
• Subsequent studies using a similar protocol to
Asch’s experiment found that certain things might
influence whether or not people will conform.
• Conformity increases when:
• One is made to feel incompetent or insecure
• The group has at least three people
• The group is unanimous (if just one other person
does not go along with the group (a dissenter),
subjects are significantly less likely to conform)
• One admires the group’s status and attractiveness
• One has made no prior commitment to a response
• One is being observed by members of the group
• One’s culture strongly encourages respect for a social
standard (a collectivist culture like China)
 Reasons for Conforming
• Informational Social Influence: Influence resulting
from one’s willingness to accept others’ opinions
about reality.
• The group may provide valuable information, but stubborn
people will never listen to others.
• Other people might conform to what the group believes
even if they figure they might know better.

Figure 18.4
Informational influence
Myers: Psychology,
Eighth Edition
Copyright © 2007 by Worth
 Reasons for Conforming
• Normative Social Influence (“social norms”): Influence
resulting from a person’s desire to gain approval or avoid
rejection/ disappointment.
• A person may respect normative behavior because there
may be a severe price to pay if it’s not respected.
• For example, Darhl Pederson and his colleagues
demonstrated conformity to a social norm.
• When someone else was present in a public restroom,
____ percent of women washed their hands. If no one
else was present, only ____ percent did so.
Breaking Social Norms

Frozen Grand Central

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwMj3PJDxuo

The Sound of Music in Central Station, Belgium

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EYAUazLI9k&fea

ture=related
• Examine which cultures are more likely to
encourage conformity:
• What are the qualities of cultures that encourage conformity?
• What types of government do these cultures have?
• Are they all communistic, democratic, or a mixture of both?
• On whom do these cultures encourage conformity –
government officials, families, adults or all of the above?
• How do these cultures handle people who don’t conform?
• Do they suffer formalized punishment (jail, fines, etc.) or
more informal social punishment (shunning, lack of job
advancement, etc.)?
Obedience
• People comply to

Courtesy of CUNY Graduate School and University Center

social pressures.
• How would they
respond to outright
command?
• Stanley Milgram
designed a study that
investigates the effects
of authority on
Stanley Milgram
obedience. (1933-1984)
Obedience and the
Milgram Experiment
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W147ybOdgpE

• Obedience is a form of compliance that occurs when people

follow direct commands, usually from someone in a position of
authority.
• Stanley Milgram (1960s), like many people, was troubled over
the Nazi war criminal defense “I was just following orders.” He
designed a landmark experiment to determine how often
ordinary people will obey an authority figure, even if it means
hurting another person.
• His experiment consisted of 40 men from the local community
recruited to participate in a psychology experiment, supposedly
on the effects of punishment on learning. The men were given
the role of “teacher” in the experiment, while a confederate
was given the role of “learner.”
• The teacher was seated before an apparatus that had 30
switches ranging from 15 to 450 volts, with labels of slight
shock, danger: severe shock, and XXX etc. Although the
apparatus looked and sounded real, it was fake. The learner
was never shocked.
• 00:00 – 24:30*
• 28 – 38  yell
 Results of Milgram’s Study
• Milgram found that _____ of the men administered
all 30 levels of the shock, even though they displayed
considerable distress at shocking the learner.
 Results of Milgram’s Study, cont.
• Subsequent studies (and there were many) indicated
that, like in Asch’s study, certain conditions could
affect one’s level of obedience. Likelihood of
obedience increased when:
• The victim could not be seen
• An authority figure was close at hand
• A prestigious organization or institution was behind the
experiment
• Lack of a defiant role model
• A dissenter was present. If a confederate defied the
experimenter and supported the subject’s objections, the
subject was significantly less likely to give all the shocks
(only 10%).
Results of Milgram’s Study, cont.
• Milgram’s experiments were extremely
controversial, as his method involved
considerable deception and emotional distress
on the part of subjects.
• The generalizability of Milgram’s findings has
stood the test of time, but his work helped
stimulate stricter ethical standards for research.
• Milgram’s findings have been replicated in many
modern nations and even higher rates of
obedience have been seen in many places.
 What have we learned from the
conformity and obedience
studies done by Asch, Zimbardo,
and Milgram?
• Ordinary people can do shocking things, because social roles
and other situational pressures can exert tremendous
influence over social behavior.
• In all of these studies, participants were pressured to choose
between following their standards and being responsive to
others (for example, in Milgram’s study, participants were torn
between hearing the victims pleas and the experimenter’s
orders).
• Milgram and Zimbardo both showed that situational forces can
lead normal people to exhibit surprisingly callous, abusive
behavior (Abu Ghraib)
Group
Influence
Social Facilitation
Social Loafing
Deindividuation
Group Polarization
Groupthink
 Group Influence
• How do groups affect our behavior?
• Social psychologists study various groups:

1. One person affecting another

2. Families
3. Teams
4. Committees
A group consists of two or
more individuals who
interact and are
interdependent.
• Imagine yourself standing in a room, holding a fishing
pole.
• Your task is to wind the reel as fast as you can.
• On some occasions you wind in the presence of another
participant who is also winding as fast as possible.
• Will the other’s presence affect your own
performance?
• In one of social psychology’s first experiments, Norman
Triplett (1898) found that adolescents would wind a
fishing reel faster in the presence of someone doing
the same thing
• He and later social psychologists studied how others’
presence affects our behavior
• Social facilitation: refers to improved
performance on simple or well-learned tasks in
the presence of others.
• Triplett (1898) noticed cyclists’ race times were
faster when they competed against others than
when they just raced against the clock.
• Works just the opposite for
difficult tasks
• When others observe us, we become
aroused, which sometimes hinders
performance
• If performance on tasks diminishes when we are not
good at that task, consider the following scenarios:
• Should students schedule when they take tests so that they can
take them when they are ready? Why or why not?
• Should students be allowed to give oral presentations in front
of the teacher if they believe their project isn’t very good or
if they are uncomfortable with their public speaking ability?
Why or why not?
The Yerkes-Dodson Law
Applies to Social Facilitation
• 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
• Have you ever noticed, while
working on a group project for
school, that some people just
don’t pull their weight?

• Welcome to the concept of

social loafing!

• Studies show that productivity

decreases as group size
increases.
We pull harder by ourselves!
• Social Loafing: is the
tendency of an individual in
a group to exert less effort
toward attaining a common
goal than if they were
individually accountable
• In other words, it’s a reduced
individual effort when people We pull harder by ourselves!
work in groups as compared to
when they work alone.
• What causes social loafing?
• Three things:
• People acting as part of a group feel less accountable, and
therefore worry less about what others think
• Group members may view their individual contributions as
dispensable
• When group members share equally in the benefits,
regardless of how much they contribute, some may slack off.
• Unless highly motivated and strongly identified with the
group, people may free-ride on others’ efforts
 Pull out a sheet of paper…
• Hide your paper so that no one around you can see it.
• On your paper, I want you to answer this question with 100%
honesty:
• If you could do anything humanly possible with complete
assurance that you would not be detected or held
responsible, what would you do?
• Fold your paper after you finish writing.
 Pull out a sheet of paper…
• Dodd (1987) reported data from 10 college psychology classes
and 3 prison psychology classes.

• Interestingly enough, Dodd found no difference between the

responses of students and prisoners.
• He classified the responses as antisocial (36%), non-normative
(19%), neutral (36%), and prosocial (9%).
• Frequent responses include illegal acts (26%), sexual behavior
(11%), and spying on others (11%). The most popular single
response Dodd has found is “rob a bank” (15%).
• This illustrates the phenomenon of social control and how it
influences our behavior.
• Looking at Dodd’s prison data, you can see that some people are
not as highly influenced by society’s constraints as others.
• This idea leads us to…
 Deindividuation
• Deindividuation: is the loss of self-awareness and self-
restraint occurring in group situations that foster arousal and
anonymity.
• For example:
• Spectators yelling at officials

Mob behavior
(lynchings, riots) is
an example of
deindividuation.
 Group Polarization
• Decision making processes can be
influenced by groups as well.
• Group polarization occurs when
group discussion strengthens a
group’s dominant point of view
and produces a shift toward a
more extreme decision in that
direction.
• In other words, when a group is
like-minded, discussion strengthens
its prevailing opinions and attitudes
and leads a group to shift toward a
more extreme decision in the
direction it was already leaning
• For example: racial prejudice, politics,
suicide terrorists As a group, both the Black
Panthers and the Ku Klux Klan
are more extreme than the
average individual in the group.
• Groupthink is the mode of thinking that occurs when the desire
for harmony in a decision-making group overrides the realistic
appraisal of alternatives (common sense).
• In other words, groupthink is when a cohesive group suspends
critical thinking in a misguided effort to promote agreement.
• Members of a group become so interested in seeking a consensus
of opinion that they start to ignore and even suppress
dissenting views.
• Many “historic fiascoes” can be attributed to its influence:
• Kennedy and the Bay of Pigs invasion
• WMDs in Iraq
• The escalation of the Vietnam conflict
• The U.S. failure to anticipate the attack on
Pearl Harbor

• Research indicates that cohesiveness (strength of the liking

relationships linking group members) is a significant
contributor to groupthink.
Groupthink in the Challenger explosion http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYpbStMyz_I
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FalKF6xFsE

Symptoms of “Groupthink”
• An illusion of invulnerability – The decision makers in the group believe
that they will succeed, demonstrating an unrealistic degree of
confidence, resulting in a willingness to resort to extreme risk.
• An illusion of unanimity – Everyone in the group believes that everyone
holds the same opinion, when in reality, other people may be having
misgivings. This shared illusion results in strong conformity pressure – no
one expresses their reservations, for fear of group criticism or retribution.
• A belief on the inherent morality of the group – The group members
believe what they are doing is the morally and ethically correct course of
action, and ignore evidence to the contrary.
• Collective rationalization – In the face of arguments against their course
of action, the group will collectively rationalize, or “explain away” the
arguments, which may have led them to reconsider their course of
action.
• Stereotypical thinking – Members of a group in the throes of groupthink
paint in broad strokes, portraying their adversaries in terms of broad
stereotypes.
• Mindguards – mindguards are self-appointed “gatekeepers” who take it
upon themselves to keep dissenting opinions out of the discussion,
protecting the “unanimity” of the group.
The Power of
Individuals
Minority Influence
 Power of Individuals

Margaret Bourke-White/ Life Magazine. © 1946 Time Warner, Inc.

• The power of social
influence is
enormous, but so is
the power of the
individual.

• Non-violent fasts and

appeals by Gandhi
led to the
independence of
India from the
British. Gandhi
Minority Influence
• Minority influence refers to the power of one or two
individuals to sway majorities.
• Remember that a third of the individuals in Milgram’s study
resisted social coercion.
• They have a consistency in the expression of their views.
• Examples:
• Gandhi, MLK Jr., Rosa Parks
• An unarmed individual single-handedly challenged a line of tanks at
Tiananmen Square.
The End