Social Psychology: Lecture 9

Lecture Overview:

Conformity, Compliance, and Obedience
Conformity
Depth of Conformity
Compliance
Obedience
Dissent

CONFORMITY

Change in behaviour due to the real or imagined influence of
other people
-

COMPLIANCE:

Change in behaviour due to direct requests #om another person

OBEDIENCE:

Change in behaviour due to commands of an authority figure

Conformity_-->Compliance-->Obedience

Increasing Pressure on the Individual

Conformity

Change in behaviour due to the real or imagined influence of
other people

How Does Conformity
Operate?

Implicit Social Influence
Informational Social Influence
Normative Social Influence

Implicit Social Influence

Influence caused by increasing the accessibility of social beliefs in working memory
Typically occurs outside of awareness

Implicit Social Influence experiment

-The Unbearable Automaticity of Being" (Bargh & Chartrand,
1999)
trying to show that social beliefs affect you without you knowing they affect you
-went to elderly living home, they had people participate in experiment in a word recognition tasks
-made pe

Informational Social Influence

-The influence of other people that leads us to conform because we see them as a source of information to guide our behaviour
-Mass psychogenic illness
-Sherif's (1936) dot studies
-Factors that increase informational social influence
-Resisting informati

Mass Psychogenic Illness

The occurrence of similar
physical symptoms in a
group of people with no
known physical cause

Orson Welles (1938)
War of the Worlds
Broadcast

freaked out people

Situations that Increase
Informational Social Influence

More likely to look to others for cues in:
Ambiguous situations
Situations of Crisis
When you have reason to believe other people are
Experts

Resisting Informational
Social Influence

Look for non-human evidence
Remember that you have a consistency bias
If something is wrong, then be the one who speaks out!

Normative Social Influence

Influence of others that leads us to conform in order to be liked
and accepted by them
Causes:
Power of Social Norms
Conformity & Social Approval

Social Impact Theory

The study of factors that increase conformity based on Normative Social Influence
Strength: The group is important
Immediacy: The group is temporospatially proximal
Number:Group size (larger group = more conformity)

Resisting Normative Social Influence

-Find an ally
-Social norms allow occasional deviation
-----Idiosyncrasy credits
-----By conforming over time, you earn "idiosyncrasy credits"
that you can effectively cash in when you want to
deviate #om the group

Depth of Conformity

Private Acceptance
Public Compliance

Private Acceptance

--> Conformity due to a genuine belief that others are right
Likely to change long term behaviour

Public Compliance

Conformity where behaviour is only changed publicly
-->You believe the others are wrong
-->May or may not change behaviour in the long run

Implicit Social Influence

Private Acceptance

Informational
Social Influence
Sherif's Dot Studies

Private Acceptance

Asch's Lines
Normative
Influence

Public Compliance

Compliance

! Change in behaviour due to direct requests #om another
person
Persuasion Strategies:
Door-in-the-face
Reciprocity Norm
Foot-in-the-door
Low-Balling

Obedience

Change in behaviour due to commands of an authority figure

Milgram's Obedience

Results:
64% of participants shocked up to 450 V mark
Recent meta-analysis (Blass, 1999):
Mean of 61 - 66% of participants shock up to the
450 V mark

Obedience

Why obey?
Normative social influence
Disobeying authority figures can have severe
consequences - very rigid social norms
Informational social influence
Authority figures are experts
Why disobey?
Sometimes the costs of compliance are too great

Minority Dissent

Observing minority dissenters may not result in explicit
behaviour change, but has a deeper impact on implicit
attitudes