Lecture 1 - Social influence

• Gordon Allport defined social psychology as “the scientific investigation of how the thoughts, feelings and behaviours of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined or implied presence of others”.
• Cognition and attitudes in social psychology include understanding how we represent the world, including the social world, and how we form attitudes about objects, including social objects.
• Social psychology also explores why we like some people and not others, and to what extent we are aware of our attitudes.
• Behaviours in social psychology include understanding how and why we change our actions in the presence of others, and how most citizens obey the law, but can turn into a mob.
• Social influence is when an individual or a group of individuals cause a change in somebody’s attitudes or behaviour.
• Social influence can take various forms: conformity, compliance, and obedience, which we will look at next week.
• Conformity is a change in behaviour due to external indirect pressures.
• Compliance is a change in behaviour due to direct requests.
• Obedience is following orders from an authority figure.
• In the 1950’s Solomon Asch conducted several experiments on how individuals yielded to group pressure.
• Asch’s findings showed that in 36.8% of the trials conformity to the wrong judgements of the majority was observed, 5% showed conformity on all trials, 76.4% gave a wrong answer at least once, and 23.6% remained completely independent.
• Group size matters in social influence, with influence increasing dramatically when majority increases, and decreasing when there is another person who disagrees, as per a meta-analysis of 133 studies in 17 countries by Bond & Smith, 1996.
• The more collectivist the culture, the more conformity to the response of others occurs, as per a study by Bond & Smith, 1996.
• There is higher conformity when the source of support is perceived as competent / agreeable, as per Allen & Levine, 1971.
• Low levels of self-esteem are associated to higher conformity levels, at least when the task is specific self-esteem, as per Campbell, Tesser, & Fairey, 1986.
• Women show higher conformity levels than men in face to face interactions, as per Eagly, 1978, 1983.
• People conform for accuracy, to be liked by others, or both.
• These two reasons for conforming result in two fundamentally different forms of social influence: Informational influence and Normative influence.
• Informational influence occurs when individuals see others as a source of information, believe that other people’s interpretations of a situation are more correct, and desire to be right or accurate.
• Normative influence occurs when individuals want to be liked and accepted by others, leading to the public acceptance of the norm.
• Contemporary examples of conformity include the public acceptance of the norm in situations such as ambiguous situations, when others are perceived as experts, and during a crisis or when there is no time to think.
• Men conform more when the task is female stereotypical, women conform more when the task is stereotypically male (Sistrunk & McDavid, 1971)