Chapter 15

Flashcards

Social influence: efforts by individuals or groups to change the attitudes and/or behaviour of other people.

Conformity: changes in behaviour and/or attitudes occurring in response to group pressure.

Normative influence: conformity based on people’s desire to be liked and/or respected by others.

Informational influence: conformity based on the perceived greater knowledge or judgment of others.

Compliance: a majority’s influence on a minority determined by the majority’s power and authority.

Conversion: a minority’s influence on a majority by persuading the majority of the correctness of its views.

Agentic state: feeling controlled by an authority figure and therefore lacking a sense of personal responsibility.

Groupthink: pressure to achieve agreement in groups in which dissent is suppressed; it can lead to disastrous decisions.

Social roles: the parts we play as members of social groups based on certain expectations about the behaviour that is appropriate.

Norms: standards or rules of behaviour that operate within a group.

Deindividuation: loss of a sense of personal identity; it can occur in a large group or crowd.

Is it human nature to conform?: The research of Asch, Milgram, and Zimbardo.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3300635.stm

A video about Asch’s conformity experiment
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRh5qy09nNw

A biography of Solomon E. Asch, and more information on his research
http://www.brynmawr.edu/aschcenter/about/solomon.htm

Resisting authority: A personal account of one of Milgram’s participants
http://www.jewishcurrents.org/2004-jan-dimow.htm

Good detail on the contribution of Stanley Milgram to psychology
http://muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/milgram.htm

An extended BBC article on the My Lai Massacre (an example of groupthink)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/64344.stm

The Stanford prison experiment website
http://www.prisonexp.org/

The official site for the BBC Prison Study by Reicher and Haslam (2006)
http://www.bbcprisonstudy.org/

A useful summary of Le Bon’s theory of the nature of crowds
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCAhKGhYzh0

Dr John Drury explores the positives of crowd behaviour
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fVPQ6X4Fw8