Social Influences Notes

Social Influences

Conformity

• Adjusting one’s behavior or thinking to coincide with a group standard
• Conditions that Strengthen Conformity:
• One is made to feel incompetent
• The group is at least three people
• The group is unanimous
• One admires the group’s status
• One had made no prior commitment
• The person is observed
• Reasons for Conforming:
• 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 others’ opinions about reality
• Social Facilitation
• Improved performance of tasks in the presence of others
• Occurs with simple or well learned tasks
• Social Loafing
• The tendency for people in a group to exert less effort when pooling efforts toward a common goal than if they were individually accountable
• Deindividuation
• The loss of self-awareness and self-restraint occurring in group situations that foster arousal and anonymity
• Group Polarization
• The concept that a group’s attitude is one of extremes and rarely moderate
• Groupthink
• The mode of thinking that occurs when the desire for harmony in a decision-making group overrides common sense
• Self Fulfilling Prophecy
• Occurs when one person’s belief about others lands one to act in a way that induce the others to appear to confirm the belief