psychology

• In the early 1960s, Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram began what would become one of social psychology's most famed and chilling experiments
• Milgram's work was inspired by the trial of World War II Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, whose defense was that he was simply following the orders of his superiors
• Milgram's experiment

  1. Recruited 40 male volunteers

  2. Built a phony "shock generator"

  3. Paired each volunteer with a colleague posing as a research subject

  4. Had them draw straws to see who would be the "learner" and who would be the "teacher"

  5. The "teacher" was told to administer electric shocks for wrong answers, increasing the shock level each time

  6. The "learner" purposely gave mainly wrong answers, eliciting shocks from the participant

  7. If a participant hesitated, the researcher gave orders to make sure he continued
• About two-thirds of the participants ended up delivering the maximum 450 volt shock, and all of the volunteers continued to at least 300 volts
• Factors that increased obedience in Milgram's experiments


  • The person giving the orders was nearby and perceived as an authority figure
  • The victim was depersonalized or placed at a distance
  • There were no role models of defiance
• Social influence

  How groups and situations can influence our behavior and thinking
• Conformity

  Adjusting our behavior or thinking to follow the behavior or rules of the group we belong to
• Asch's conformity experiment

  1. Volunteer is told they're participating in a study on visual perception

  2. Seated at a table with 5 other people who are all actors

  3. The group is shown a picture and asked to say which of 3 comparison lines matches the standard line

  4. The actors intentionally give the wrong answer, causing the real participant to struggle with trusting their own eyes or going with the group
• More than a third of participants in Asch's experiment were willing to give the wrong answer to mesh with the group
• Factors that increase conformity

  • Feeling incompetent or insecure
  • Being in a group of 3 or more people who all agree
  • Admiring the group's status or attractiveness
  • Feeling that others are watching your behavior
  • Coming from a culture that emphasizes respect for social standards
• Normative social influence

  Complying in order to fuel our need to be liked or belong
• Social facilitation

  How being in front of a group can help or hinder our performance
• Social loafing

  Tendency to exert less effort when you're not individually accountable
• Deindividuation

  Loss of self-awareness and restraint that can occur in group situations
• Group polarization

  Attitudes and beliefs becoming stronger when we talk with others who share them
• Groupthink

  When a group makes bad decisions because they're too caught up in the unique internal logic of their group
• About two-thirds of participants in Milgram's experiment would shock someone to death, but another third would not, showing that while group behavior is powerful, individual choice is also important
• Input

  Sensory information by the five senses (touch, smell, sight, hearing, taste)
• Processing

  How sensory information is changed into a form that can be memorized
• Encoding

  The process of converting sensory information into a form that can be stored in memory
• Storage

  The keeping of memory
• Retrieval

  The recalling of information from memory
• Output

  What can be retrieved and remembered
• Duration

  How long information lasts in memory
• Capacity

  How much information can be stored
• Sensory memory

  • Very brief duration (fraction of a second)
  • Constant flow of information
• Sensory memory registers

  • Echoic (sound)
  • Iconic (visual)
  • Gustatory (taste)
  • Olfactory (smell)
• Short-term memory

  • Duration of around 7-30 seconds
  • Capacity of around 7 +/- 2 items
  • Held in auditory format
• Long-term memory

  • Potential infinite capacity
  • Duration of at least 50 years
  • Encoded semantically (by meaning)
• Sensory memory to short-term memory

  1. Attention paid to sensory information

  2. Information enters short-term memory
• Short-term memory to long-term memory

  1. Rehearsal

  2. Information encoded into long-term memory
• Forgetting in short-term memory

  Decay or displacement
• Miller showed capacity of short-term memory is 7 +/- 2 chunks
• Baddeley's lab experiments lacked ecological validity
• The multi-store model oversimplifies memory, lacking differentiation between semantic, episodic and procedural memory
• HM

  • Could not form new long-term memories
  • Could remember short-term information for 15 minutes
  • Could still learn procedural skills like using a walking frame
• Clive Wearing

  • Had anterograde and retrograde amnesia
  • Could not form new short-term or long-term memories
  • Could still play piano from procedural memory
• Anterograde amnesia

  Inability to form new long-term memories after an event
• Retrograde amnesia

  Inability to remember events before an event
• Peterson and Peterson conducted a key study on short-term memory capacity