Psychology: Unit III Social Influence

SOCIAL INFLUENCE

Conformity

• adjusting to one's behavior or thinking to coincide with a group standard

What strengthens conformity? (six)

1. one in made to feel incompetent
2. the group is at least three people
3. group is unanimous
4. one admires the group's status
5. one had made no prior commitment
6. the person is observed

Reasons for Conformity

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 other's opinions about reality in the presence

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 in they were individually accountable

Deindividuation

• loss of self-awareness and self-restraint occurring in group situations that foster arousal and anonymity

Group Polarization

• concept that a group's attitude is one of extremes and rarely moderate

Group-think

• mode of thinking that occurs when the desire for harmony in a decision making group overrides common sense

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