Key Terms

• Conformity 


  A change in behaviour or belief as a result of real or imagined group pressure
• compliance 


  agreeing with people in public but privately disagreeing
• identification 


  taking on the views of a group we admire or want to join
• internalisation


  behaving like a group of people because you’ve actually accepted their viewpoint
• informational social influence 


  conforming because we’re unsure about what to do in a situation
• normative social influence


  conforming in order to fit in
• task difficulty (asch)


  people are more likely to conform when the task is more difficult
• group size (Asch)


  we are more likely to conform when there are more people in the group
• unanimity 


  having another person who disagrees with the majority decreases conformity levels
• social roles


  the behaviours expected of a person in a certain position in a group
• deindividuation 


  loss of individual identity
• dispositional 


  behaviour is due to our personality
• situational 


  behaviour is due to our environment
• Legitimacy of authority


  We are more likely to obey someone with a higher position in a social hierarchy
• agentic state 


  acting as an agent for an authority figure
• agentic shift 


  The shift from autonomy to agency
• obedience 


  acting in response to a direct order from someone with perceived authority
• proximity (milgram)


  obedience levels decreased when the teacher and learner were in the same room
• uniform (milgram) 


  obedience levels increased when the experimenter wore a grey lab coat
• location (milgram)


  obedience levels increased when the study was done at Yale
• authoritarian personality 


  having extreme respect for authority
• f-scale questionnaire 


  predicts someone’s level of authoritarian personality
• scapegoating 


  displacing feelings onto people we perceive to be weaker
• resistance to social influence

  the ability to understand the social pressure to conform to the majority and obey authority
• locus of control 


  the extent to which we feel we are in control of our lives
• internal locus of control 


  we feel everything is within our control
• external locus of control

  we believe everything is beyond our control
• social support 


  having an ally who disagrees with the majority increases confidence and makes us more likely to resist social influence
• minority influence

  a minority changes the beliefs and behaviours of a majority
• synchronic consistency 


  Everyone has the same opinion
• diachronic consistency 


  everyone has had the same opinion for a long time
• commitment 


  going to extreme measures to show you’re committed to your cause
• flexibility 


  being willing to take other opinions/suggestions into account
• augmentation principle 


  Beliefs are seen as ‘bigger’ than obstacles so are more likely to be accepted
• deeper processing 


  converting to a different viewpoint
• snowball effect 


  The increase in people agreeing with the majority happens more quickly when more people change their views
• social crypto-amnesia 


  having a memory that a change occurred but not remembering how