MENOR, GENE AZIL

SERRANO, ASHA LIZA

BS PSY 3-1
Conformity A change in behavior or belief as the result of real or imagined
group pressure. Conformity is not just acting as other people act;
it is also being affected by how they act.

Acceptance Conformity that involves both acting and believing in accord with
social pressure. Acceptance occurs when you genuinely believe in
what the group has persuaded you to do—you inwardly and
sincerely believe that the group’s actions are right.

Obedience A type of compliance involving acting in accord with a direct

order or command

Compliance Conforming to an expectation or a request without really Example: Soldier shooting at a civilian as ordered by
believing in what you are doing his commanding chief.

TABLE 1: SUMMARY OF CLASSIC OBEDIENCE STUDIES

TOPIC RESEARCHER METHOD REAL-LIFE EXAMPLE

Norm formation Sherif Assessing suggestibility Interpretation of events

after hearing from others

Conformity Asch Agreeing to wrong Do what others do

perceptual judgements

Obedience Milgram Complying Soldiers following

questionable orders
Sherif’s Studies of Participants are asked how far a dot of light moved in a dark According to my understanding to thus topic you
Norm Formation room. When in guessing in a group, a group estimate emerges. can influence a person's perception by presenting or
However, the dot never actually moved and so the participants in showing him or her that not everything you see is
the group are all wrong. right or normal.

Mood linkage Sharing mood with the people around you/within members of a Example: Frank's mood is happy then he joins his
group. friends and started to say jokes soh he link his mood
to his friends by using his jokes and sense of humor.

Mass hysteria Suggestibility to problems that spreads throughout a large group Suicide can also be socially contagious. When
of people. Marilyn Monroe committed suicide in August 1962,
303 more people than average took their lives that
month
What is conversion disorder?

One study found that copycat suicides were 14

It is a form of mass hysteria that happens when psychological times more likely when the victim was a celebrity
stress is unconsciously expressed in physical symptoms. and 87 percent more common when the coverage
was on television rather than in a newspaper

Chameleon effect Mimicking someone else’s behavior An experiment in the Netherlands by Rick van
Baaren and his colleagues (2004) suggests that
mimicry helps people look more helpful and
likeable.

There is one exception to the imitation-fosters

fondness rule: mimicking another's anger fosters
disliking
 Asch’s Studies of Dental flossing experiment – when presented with a
Group Pressure higher flossing rate compared to an individual's own
flossing rate, the individual would floss more.

Cancer screening – presenting higher screening

rates lead to more screening, opposite is also true

Soccer referee decision – home teams receive fewer

yellow cards

Milgram’s In this experiment one of the participants must teach a list of In Milgram's obedience studies he inflict pain to the
obedience studies word pairs to the other and to punish errors by delivering shocks subject of the experiment to see if they will abide to
of increasing intensity. The experimenter directs the teacher the task that Milgram wants them to do.
when to increase shock. Roles appear to be assigned randomly.

75, 90, 105 – grunt

120 – shocks are painful

150 – cries out “get me out of here”

270 – screams of agony

300 – screams refusal to answer

330 – fall silent

Goes up to 435, 450 and XXX

Results: 40 men—20- to 50-year-olds with varying jobs—26 of

them (65 percent) progressed all the way to 450 volts
 Ethical issues: distressed ‘teachers’ but follow-up showed no real
harm

Design issue: no control group

What are the 4 1. The victim's emotional distance A person's obedience varies to his emotional
Factors that closeness, physical distance, knowledge and
2. The authority's closeness and legitimacy
Determine familiarity to the authority.
Obedience? 3. Whether the authority was part of a respected institution

4. The liberating effects of a disobedient fellow participant

Victim’s emotional More distant from the victim leads to less compassion and Full compliance dropped to a still-astonishing 30
distance greater obedience. percent when teachers were required to force the
learner’s hand into contact with a shock plate.

Difficulty with face-to-face killings.

Soldiers at war are allowed to bomb a place with

innocent civilians but are not allowed to shoot
people with close contact. The concept is related to
this situation because it allows the soldiers to be
less likely compassionate to those very distant with
them.

Closeness and The physical presence of the experimenter also affected More rebellion/less compliance when authority did
legitimacy of the obedience. When Milgram’s experimenter gave the commands not appear legitimate.
Authority by telephone, full obedience dropped to 21 percent (although
many lied and said they were obeying). Other studies confirm
 that when the one making the command is physically close,
compliance increases.
Nurse and doctor’s orders

Perceived authority, police authority,

A con man posing as a police officer in a fast-food

chain ordered a strip-search when a manager
complains about their employee that fits the
description of a patient overdosed with a drug. The
police officer looking like a legitimate one, makes
the manager more obedient with its order even if he
didn't know the person personally. That's when the
use of closeness and legitimacy of the authority took
place.

Institutional Milgram and Yale. In post experimental interviews, many If the person's position or an institution is higher or
Authority participants said that had it not been for Yale’s reputation, they more known than you, you are less likely to have
would not have obeyed. authority.

Group Influence Conformity to group (may be positive or negative). The heroic firefighters who rushed into the flaming
World Trade Center towers on 9/11 were “incredibly
brave,” note social psychologists Susan Fiske, Lasana
Harris, and Amy Cuddy (2004), but they were also
“partly obeying their superiors, partly conforming to
extraordinary group loyalty.”

Behavior and Dissonance: harm vs being good participant What is the slippery slope of obedience? The
Attitudes in dissonance.
Many subjects rationalized the shocks “He was so stupid and
Obedience Studies
stubborn he deserved to get shocked”

Illustrate how this might be used to groom people to

become torturers? People knowing that others are
 more likely to obey when they are being punished
would have more chance of engaging to torture
other people.

Power of social Group indifference to sexism, racism Milgram’s studies also offer a lesson about evil. In
norms horror movies and suspense novels, evil results from
a few bad apples, a few depraved killers. In real life
GOOD PEOPLE SOMETIMES DO BAD THINGS we think of Hitler’s extermination of Jews or of
Osama bin Laden’s terrorist plot. But evil also results
-9/11 terrorists were nice from social forces—from the powerful situations
that help make a whole barrel of apple go bad

To explain is not to excuse

“When we understand the ordinariness of extraordinary evil, we

will be less surprised by evil, less likely to be unwitting
contributors to evil”

What predicts 1. Group Size To be able to join in a certain group of people who
conformity 2. Unanimity have the same interest, action, state, or response to
3. Cohesion a certain topic you need to conform to them.
4. Status
5. Public Response

Cohesiveness A “we feeling”; the extent to which members of a group are In sports like basketball you need to have a team
bound together, such as by attraction to one another. who have great teamwork to be able to win every
match.

Status Imitating high ranking members Well dressed non jaywalking reduced jaywalking the
most
Seniors less likely to conform
Who is more likely to conform? lower ranking
Prestige begets influence
 members

Public response In experiments, people conform more when they must respond More varied response when responding privately
in front of others rather than writing their answers privately

Prior commitment Most people do not change their decisions after making a public Sports judges
commitment.

Reasons for Normative influence Going against the norm activates the part of the
conformity brain associated with emotions. Conformity
Informational influence
activates brain regions associated with emotion.

Conforming with wrong answers activates brain

region on perception. Thus, we conform because we
are afraid of being wrong.

Normative Conformity based on a person’s desire to fulfill others’ Going along with the crowd to avoid rejection, to
influence expectations, often to gain acceptance and avoid social stay in good graces, to gain approval
rejection/ostracism.

High price for deviation

In one experiment, participants who were ostracized by others
were more likely to obey an experimenter’s command to go
outside in freezing weather to take 39 photographs. More candies beside a bowl more likely to eat
candies

Normative influence leads to compliance, especially for people

who have recently seen others ridiculed or who are seeking to To decrease binge-drinking spread news “most
climb a status ladder. students drink moderately”
 Concern for social image produces normative influence.

Informational Conformity occurring when people accept evidence about reality Friends have extra influence TEMPORARILY
influence provided by other people. Allows one to privately accept others’
Gaslighting yourself
influence.

The desire to be correct produces informational influence.

Who conforms? ● People that are higher in agreeableness and Example: Socially insecure individuals (ones who
conscientiousness lack social circles or peers)

● Collectivists

● Self-conscious people

Personality ● Seeks to please other people Whistleblowers for Abu Ghraib

● High in agreeableness (value getting along with other

� Received death threats
people)

● High in conscientiousness (follow soicial norms)

Culture Collectivist vs individualist Nonconformist 🡪 more creative problem solving

Collectivist 🡪 more likely to conform Conformist 🡪 thrive in coordinating responses to

threats (pathogens, tb, malaria)
Individualistic 🡪 less likely to conform

working class 🡪 prefer similarity, choose similar pens, happier

when others make the same choice

middle class 🡪 prefer to see themselves as unique

Social Roles A role is composed of a cluster of norms. Conforming to the Social roles are the roles of people according to
 norms expected from the roles changes people. what cluster they belong.

Role Reversal Role reversals can help each understand the other. A negotiator Example: to be able to understand the sense of the
or a group leader can therefore create better communication by importance of money in a spoiled brats, you need to
having the two sides reverse roles, with each arguing the other’s ask them to find a job and earn money with their
position. own sweat.

Motivation to be different You want to be unique from others.

Reactance A motive to protect or restore one’s sense of freedom. In one field experiment, many students stopped
Reactance arises when someone threatens our freedom of wearing a “Livestrong” wristband when geeky
action. Individuals value their sense of freedom and self-efficacy. students started wearing the band (Berger & Heath,
When blatant social pressure threatens their sense of freedom, 2008).
they often rebel.

Likewise, rich Brits stopped wearing Burberry caps

Because we know we should do it, it becomes difficult to actually after the caps caught on among soccer hooligans
do it without feeling our freedom is compromised. If we know (Clevstrom & Passariello, 2006)
others are doing it (normative influence again), we’re more likely
to do it too

Example, Kia loves to wear pink as she always feel

“DO WHAT I DO, NOT WHAT I SAY IS RIGHT”
bright and cute with it. One day, people around her
always point it out and now start to wear the same
style as her. Now, she feels pressured and is starting
to feel like she's losing her freedom to express
herself by the way she dresses. She then changes
her style the following day.

Asserting Non-conformists 🡪 higher in status Silicon valley millionaires, ripped jeans

Uniqueness
Deprivation of uniqueness 🡪High need for uniqueness 🡪 conform
less
White people who grow up amid non-White people
 tend to have a strong White identity

One is conscious of oneself insofar as, and in the ways that, one is
different. Thus, “If I am a Black woman in a group of White
Small differences 🡪 large differences
women, I tend to think of myself as a Black; if I move to a group
of Black men, my blackness loses salience and I become more Catholics vs protestant
conscious of being a woman” (McGuire et al., 1978).
Rivalry among closely related groups

It is not just any kind of distinctiveness we seek but

distinctiveness in the right direction. Our quest is not merely to
be different from the average, but better than average.

Communitarianis Individualism that balances our nonconformist individualism with Communitarianism is where individualism and
m a spirit of community collectivism is balanced.