Student ID number: 816021689

Course code/Title: PSYC1004 - Introduction to Social Psychology

Chosen lecture topics: Social Influence and Prejudice

Social Influence

Conformity

Conformity involves changing your behaviors in order to "fit in" or "go along" with the people

around you. This social influence might involve agreeing with or acting like the majority of

people in a specific group, or it might involve behaving in a particular way in order to be

perceived as "normal" by the group. Essentially, conformity involves giving in to group pressure.

There are two main types of conformity:

Normative Social Influence

Normative influence comes from a desire to avoid punishments (such as going along with the

rules in class even though you don't agree with them) and gain rewards (such as behaving in a

certain way in order to get people to like you), but is more based on the need to be liked or

accepted by a group.

Informational Social Influence

Informational influence occurs when people change their behavior in order to be correct. For

example in a class room setting you are arguing with a classmate over which perspective of a
given idea is correct however you are both uncertainty weather the others idea is correct so

you cannot come to an agreement so you both go to a neutral friend who you both believe is

highly intelligent to settle the argument.

There are others such as:

identification

Identification occurs when people conform to what is expected of them based on their social

roles. Zimbardo's famous Stanford Prison Experiment is a good example of people altering their

behavior in order to fit into their expected roles.

Compliance involves changing one's behavior while still internally disagreeing with the group.

Internalization occurs when we change our behavior because we want to be like another

person.

Factor that influence Conformity

The difficulty of the task: Difficult tasks can lead to both increased and decreased conformity.

Not knowing how to perform a difficult task makes people more likely to conform, but the

increased difficulty can also make people more accepting of different responses, leading to less

conformity.

Individual differences: Personal characteristics such as motivation to achieve and strong

leadership abilities are linked with a decreased tendency to conform.

The size of the group: People are more likely to conform in situations that involve between

three and five other people.

Compliance refers to changing one's behavior due to the request or direction of another

person. It is going along with the group or changing behavior to fit in with the group, while still

disagreeing with the group.

Principles that underlie compliance

 Friendship/ Liking

 Commitment/ Consistency

 Reciprocity

 Scarcity

 Social Validation

 Authority

There are multiple Compliance techniques such as:

Foot in the door Technique

The foot in the door technique (Freedman & Fraser, 1966) assumes agreeing to a small request

increases the likelihood of agreeing to a second, larger request.

Initially you make a small request and once the person agrees to this, they find it more difficult

to refuse a bigger one. The foot-in-the-door technique works on the principle of consistency.

This means that as long as the request in consistent with or similar in nature to the original

small request, the technique will work.

Refusing a large request increases the likelihood of agreeing to a second, smaller request.

Initially you make a big request which a person can be expected to refuse. Then you make a

smaller request which the person finds difficult to refuse because they feel they shouldn’t

always say “no”.

This technique works due to the principle of reciprocity. Saying “no” to a large request may

make the person feel they owe the other person who made the request a favor.

The Low-Ball Technique

Agreeing to purchase something at a given price increases the likelihood of agreeing to

purchase it at a higher price.

Initially you get the individual to agree to your request and then afterwards you increase the

original terms. Trick then into agreeing more than they intended.

This success of this technique works on the principle of commitment. Because the person has

said “yes” or agreed to an initial request, commitment has been given. When the request

changes or becomes unreasonable, the person will (to a degree) find it difficult to say “no”

because of having originally committed themselves.

Social influence is the change in behavior that one person causes in another, intentionally or

unintentionally, as a result of the way the changed person perceives themselves in relationship

to the influencer, other people and society in general.

Symbolic social influence: the influence when no one is there. Results of the mental

representation of others, or the result of a relationship with another person.

People can be affected by others, even if they are not physically present.

Thinking about others evokes a relational scheme that can cause goals associated with them.

You can activate the goal associated with the person you are thinking of.

Remembering these goals can improve compliance and have a strong influence on behavior.

Emotional Contagion – when our feelings and emotions are influenced by those of others

unintentionally.

Modelling – learning through observing the actions of others or using them as a guide to own

behavior in situations where there are no clear rules for how we should behave.
Obedience to authority

Obedience is a form of social influence that involves performing an action under the orders of

an authority figure, it in ways way similar to Conformity but that is not necessarily the case. It

differs from compliance (which involves changing your behavior at the request of another

person) and conformity (which involves altering your behavior in order to go along with the rest

of the group). Instead, obedience involves altering your behavior because a figure of authority

has told you to.

Obedience differs from conformity in following ways:

Obedience involves an order; conformity involves a request.

Obedience involves following the order of someone with a higher status; conformity usually

involves going along with people of equal status.

Obedience relies on social power; conformity relies on the need to be socially accepted.

The Stanford Prison Experiment

Social psychologist Philip Zimbardo staged an exploration into the study of prisoners and prison

life. He set up a mock prison in the basement of the Stanford University psychology department

and assigned his participants to play the roles of either prisoners or guards, with Zimbardo

himself acting as the prison warden.

The study had to be discontinued after a mere six days even though it was originally slated to

last two weeks, because the participants had become so involved in their roles, with the guards
utilizing authoritarian techniques to gain the obedience of the prisoners. In some cases, the

guards even subjected the prisoners to psychological abuse, harassment, and physical torture.

The results of the Stanford Prison Experiment are often used to demonstrate how easily people

are influenced by characteristics of the roles and situations they are cast in, but Zimbardo also

suggested that environmental factors play a role in how prone people are to obey authority.

This does not only apply only to prisons either, after WWII ended in 1945 the remaining solders

of the fallen Nazi regime were being evaluated for war crimes but when the German soldiers

were asked why they committed such atrocities during the war the majority responded with

because they were told to, and if they hadn’t complied there were expected to be painted as a

Jewish sympathizer and executed or put in the concertation camps.

Social influence in work settings

Social influence is common in the work place such as in the example of a salesmen (assuming

they were a man) will observe the clothing a demeanor of a person and adapt their behavior to

convince the customer to but a more expensive product, this might differ by gender as well if

the woman was a customer the salesman might just highlight the psychically appealing aspects

of the product based on aesthetics alone but however if the customer were a man the

salesman might speak to the customer with a sense of comradery and highlight the technical

aspects of the product rather than the overall aesthetic which indicates that the that salesman

has the understanding that the man has more value over the technical aspects of the product

with assuming if the customer has any background knowledge on the product at all.
Prejudice

Stereotype formation

Stereotypes are characteristics imposed upon groups of people because of their race,

nationality, and sexual orientation. These characteristics tend to be oversimplifications of the

groups involved, and while some people truly do embody the traits of their stereotype, they are

not necessarily representative of all people within that group. Stereotypes are not always

accurate and even if positive, can be harmful.

Stereotypes develop when we are unable or unwilling to obtain all of the information, we

would need to make fair judgements about people or situations. And also, when we are

unaware of the total representation of a certain ethnicity or culture, we make stereotypes in

many cases to allow us to fill in the blanks.

Gender stereotypes

Gender stereotyping is the excessive generalization of the qualities that women and men

possess that distinguish the two sexes from each other. It contains positive and negative traits

and convey status.

Sexism - reflects stereotypes based on gender

Ambivalent sexism (Glick & Fiske, 1996) – framework that proposes 2 components to sexism:

benevolent and hostile.

weak and best suited to traditional gender roles. e.g., women are pure and should be

protected.

May serve to keep women in low-status positions as the more women depend on men to be

their provider, the less likely they are to seek independence.

Gender stereotypes are based on exaggerations of attributes possessed by men and women.

Common gender stereotypes include:

Men are Women are

Prejudice

Prejudice is an unjustified or incorrect attitude (usually negative) towards an individual based

solely on the individual’s membership of a social group. For example, a person may hold

prejudiced views towards a certain race or gender etc. (e.g. sexist).

There are two types of prejudice:

Implicit prejudice
Implicit prejudice can be automatically activated and can affect overt behaviour even though

people are unaware that they hold such views.

Explicate prejudice

Explicit prejudice operates at the conscious level and are the attitudes you are aware of

towards a specific event, situation, person, or group.

Ways of countering Prejudice

 Passing laws and regulations that require fair and equal treatment for all groups of

people

 Gaining public support and awareness for anti-prejudice social norms

 Making people aware of the inconsistencies in their own beliefs

 Increased contact with members of other social groups

Discrimination

Discrimination is the behavior or actions, usually negative, towards an individual or group of

people, especially on the basis of sex/race/social class, etc.

In Western societies while women are often discriminated against in the workplace, men are

often discriminated against in the home and family environments. For instance, after a divorce,

woman receive primary custody of the children far more often than men. Women on average

earn less pay than men for doing the same job.
Social norms - behaviour considered appropriate within a social group - are one possible

influence on prejudice and discrimination. People may have prejudiced beliefs and feelings and

act in a prejudiced way because they are conforming to what is regarded as normal in the social

groups to which they belong

Racism

Rascism stems from discrimation whereby discrimination is directed towards a specific racial

group.

In modern racism consisting of thinking that minorities are seeking and receiving more benefits

than they deserve and a denial that discrimination affects their outcomes, it can also involve

hiding prejudice from others in public settings, but expressing bigoted attitudes when it is safe

to do so.

Explicit measures: Aware of true attitudes

 Bogus Pipeline — “lie detector” convinces subjects to respond honestly.

 Technique used to reduce false answers when attempting to collect self-report data. It

measures your true attitudes, irrespective of what you express.

 The experimenter attaches electrodes connected to an elaborate-looking piece of

electronic equipment to your forearms.

 Bona fide Pipeline - uses priming to measure implicit racial attitudes.

 People alternate between looking at different kinds of faces (Black/ White) and reading

words that they need to classify as pleasant/ unpleasant.

 The assumption is that someone who is prejudiced against Black people will answer

“unpleasant” faster after seeing a Black face than a White face.

Bibliography

Branscombe, N., R., & Baron, R., A. (2016). Social Psychology. Pearson.

McLeod, Saul. “Conformity.” Simply Psychology, 2016.

https://www.simplypsychology.org/conformity.html

McLeod, Saul. “The Psychology of Compliance.” Simply Psychology, 2014.

https://www.simplypsychology.org/compliance.html

McLeod, Saul. “Obedience to Authority.” Simply Psychology, 2007.

https://www.simplypsychology.org/obedience.html