Social Psychology Exam 2 Studies only

Study on prestige and prevaance of models?

Field experiments show that you are more likely to do it if you follow a jaywalker who is well dressed rather than poorly dressed

Rewards for conformity difference in Asche study?

But in Asch's experiment and in the case of Sam and his friends, the situations were much more subtle. In these situations, there were no explicit rewards for conformity, no explicit punishments for deviance, and no mindguards prodding deviants toward agreement, just people reporting what they saw in a matter-of-fact way. Why, then, did Asch's participants conform?

Study on unanimity? (Asche)

But when unanimity is broken, so is the pressure to conform. Even a single ally who sees it your way releases you from that pressure; conformity drops sharply in such cases.31 In fact, even if the unanimity is broken by someone who gives a different wrong answer (answering that the correct line is C while the rest of the group responds with A), the presence of a fellow dissenter sharply reduces conformity, and the participant is likely to give the correct response: line B. It only takes one dissenter to seriously diminish the power of the group to induce conformity.32

Studies on age and conformity

Compared to adult drivers, teenage drivers are more than three times as likely to be in an accident if passengers are in the car

Ethics of Milgram's Experiment

-Critics said the Milgram's experiment stressed the participants against their will -They argued that the participant's self-esteem may have been altered -Milgram stated that the critic's controversy was "terribly overblown"

Study has been repeated before? Anthony

Anthony Pratkanis repeated the experiment precisely as Asch had run it 50 years earlier. The participants in this replication were also college students, many of whom considered themselves nonconformists. The results were almost identical to Asch's

Study of Diffusion of Responsibility Darley/Latane

Darley and Latané61 arranged an experimental situation in which people were placed in separate rooms but were able to communicate with one another by microphones and earphones. They could hear one another but not see one another. The investigators then played a recording imitating the sounds of an epileptic seizure on the part of one of the participants. In one experimental condition, each person was led to believe that he or she was the only one who overheard the seizure; in other conditions, each person was led to believe that one or more people had also heard it. Those who thought they were the only listener were far more likely to leave their room and try to help than were those who thought others were listening, too. As the number of people listening increased, individual responsibility was diffused among them, and the likelihood of offering assistance decreased.

Individualistic non conforming?

Deviant

Competing self interest (effective tool of persuasion) study?

Elaine Walster, Darcy Abrahams, and I58 presented college students with a newspaper clipping of an interview between a news reporter and Joe "The Shoulder" Napolitano, who was identified as a mobster and hit man. (We made up his name.) In one experimental condition, Joe "The Shoulder" argued for stricter courts and more severe sentences. In another condition, he argued that courts should be more lenient and sentences less severe. We also ran a parallel set of conditions in which the same statements were attributed to a respected public official. When Joe "The Shoulder" argued for more lenient courts, he was totally ineffective; in fact, he caused the participants' opinions to change slightly in the opposite direction. But when he argued for stricter, more powerful courts, he was extremely effective — as effective as the respected public official delivering the same argument.

Physical distance and conformity milligram experiment

Finally, the physical proximity of the authority figure also plays a role in whether people obey. Milgram found that when the experimenter was out of the room and issued his orders by telephone, the number of fully obedient participants dropped to below 25 percent. Moreover, released from the close scrutiny of the experimenter, several of the people who continued to administer shocks cheated; they administered shocks of lower intensity than they were ordered to — and never bothered to tell the experimenter that they had deviated from the proper procedure. I regard that finding as their touching attempt to respond to the demands of legitimate authority while at the same time minimizing the pain they inflict on others. It reminds me of Dunbar, a character in Joseph Heller's classic World War II novel Catch 22. Dunbar is ordered to bomb villages in Italy. Unwilling either to rebel openly or to harm innocent civilians, he drops his bombs over empty fields close to the Italian villages designated as his targets.

Madeline Heilman

Found that, under most circumstances, the more intense the attempts to prevent people from signing the petition, the more likely they were to sign

As provocative as these comparisons are, we should be cautious lest we overinterpret Milgram's results. (limitations 1)

Given that 67 percent of the participants complied with the experimenter's command, some commentators have suggested that perhaps most people would have behaved as Adolf Eichmann did had they found themselves in a similar situation. This may be true, but we should also notice some important points of difference. Because each man in Milgram's study freely consented to participate, he had every reason to assume that the learner had also volunteered. Accordingly, it is likely that he felt that they were both obligated to avoid disrupting the experiment. Moreover, each participant faced the demands of the experimenter alone. Just as conformity dropped in the Asch experiment with the presence of one dissenter, the proportion of fully obedient people in a variation of the Milgram paradigm dropped to just 10 percent when they were joined by two fellow teachers who defied the experimenter's orders to continue. Also, in most of Milgram's studies, the authority figure issuing the orders was a scientist in a prestigious laboratory at Yale University, and his cover story credits the experiment as being an investigation of an important scientific question. The participants naturally assumed that the experimenter (wearing a white lab coat, no less) at a highly respected institution like Yale would be a responsible, benevolent professional. Surely he would not issue orders that would result in the death or injury of a human being as a part of his experiment. Indeed, when Milgram moved the study from Yale University to a suite of offices in industrial Bridgeport, a few miles away, full obedience dropped to 48 percent. Removing the prestige of Yale University considerably reduced the degree of obedience.

Matthew McGlone51 demonstrated our susceptibility to PERIPHERAl route

He found that college students were more persuaded by unfamiliar aphorisms that rhyme ("woes unite foes") than the same ideas presented in nonrhyming form ("woes unite enemies"). The peripheral route to persuasion can be surprisingly subtle — yet surprisingly effective.

Sherif study used autokinetic effect to study conformity

He had college students sit in a dark room, watch a point of light, and then, each time it "moved," report how far. Each student did this alone for several trials, and after several trials, settled on a reliable distance, usually between two to six inches. Then they were put in the dark room in small groups and asked to repeat the task, this time reporting their estimates out loud. Sherif noticed a strong effect of the presence of others: Nearly everyone's own judgments started to move in the direction of the group average. For example, if I typically saw the light move two inches when I was on my own, but my groupmates tended to see it move six inches, I would now start reporting around four inches of movement. Likewise, those who originally saw more movement would report seeing less after hearing my opinion. What's more, the change stuck. After being exposed to a group's opinions, members were tested again, and their answers continued to reflect the group's influence on their own judgments. Sherif later found that he could reliably shape the group norm by having his confederates give arbitrary estimates. So long as the deviation from the actual norm wasn't too large, he could steer the group in whichever direction he wanted.

Aronson field experiment on conformity?

I48 conducted a simple field experiment aimed at inducing students to shorten their showers by leading them to believe that their peers were shortening theirs. We enlisted the aid of a few male students who acted as role models and observers. Not wanting people to conform out of a fear of disapproval or punishment, we set up the experiment in the following way: Our role model entered the shower room at the university's athletic center when it was empty, went to the far end, turned his back to the entrance, and turned on the shower. As soon as he heard someone enter the shower room, he would turn off the shower, lather up his body with soap, and then briefly rinse off, just as signs posted nearby requested. He'd then leave the room without so much as glancing at the student who had entered. As he left, another student (our observer) entered and surreptitiously noted whether the subject of our investigation followed suit by turning off the shower while soaping up. We found that 49 percent of the students conformed, and when two students simultaneously modeled the appropriate behavior, conformity zoomed to 67 percent!

Reagan laugh track study? (Steven Fein)

In a baseline condition, they presented the debate just as people saw it in 1984. In a second condition, he removed two of Reagan's most humorous lines, including the age-and-inexperience joke. In the third condition, he left the funny lines in but removed the audience laughter and applause. After watching, participants rated their liking for both candidates and assessed who had done a better job in the debate. Both changes to the original tape made a difference: Eliminating Reagan's jokes altogether was enough to completely erase the perception that Reagan won the debate. But it wasn't the jokes by themselves that were crucial. When observers heard Reagan's jokes without the audience reaction, most of them thought Mondale won; with the laughter included, they thought Reagan won! No direct pressure was needed, just other people laughing. A good deal of conformity proceeds this way; social cues in the environment tell us what others are feeling or thinking or doing, which in turn influences what we feel and think and do.

Adam Grant has studied the effects of different kinds of incentives for getting people to work hard.

In one of his studies, he examined the productivity of volunteers making cold calls to raise money for student scholarships. Grant discovered a lovely technique that persuaded his volunteer callers to nearly triple the donations they got. All he had to do was arrange a five-minute meeting between the volunteers and a past recipient of one of the fellowships they were soliciting for. Being able to connect their efforts to a human being — who expressed the moral emotion of gratitude — energized their fundraising efforts.

Subsequent research by Leventhal and his coworkers supports this analysis.

In one study, participants watched films of serious automobile accidents. Some watched the films on a large screen up close, which made the images really alarming; others watched them from far away on a much smaller screen. Among the participants with high or moderate self-esteem, those who saw the films on the large screen were much more likely to take subsequent protective action than were those who saw the films on the small screen. The reverse pattern applied to people with low self-esteem: They were more likely to act when they saw the films on a small screen; those who saw the films on a large screen couldn't cope and tuned out, saying they had difficulty even thinking of themselves as victims of auto accidents. Yet even people with high self-esteem will behave like people with low self-esteem if they are overwhelmed with fear and feel there is nothing they can do to prevent or manage a threatening situation. In that case, most of them will get into that bed and search for the blanket.

Rod Bond found of other cultures?

In their analysis of 133 experiments using the Asch procedure in 17 different countries, Rod Bond and Peter Smith22 found that conformity is more prevalent in collectivist societies, which explicitly value group harmony (like Japan and China), than in individualistic societies (like the United States and France).

Hovland, sheriff, Muzafer study

In their experiment, the communication was based on a red-hot issue, one the participants felt strongly about: whether their state should remain "dry" or "go wet" — that is, whether or not to change the law prohibiting the distribution and sale of alcoholic beverages. The voters in that state were divided on this issue, and the participants were a representative sample: Some felt strongly that the state should remain dry, others felt strongly that it should go wet, and the rest took a moderate position. The participants were divided into groups of people reflecting all three positions and then presented with arguments supporting one of the three opinions: a "wet" message, which argued for the unlimited and unrestricted sale of liquor; a "dry" message, which argued for complete prohibition; and a moderately "wet" message, which argued to allow some drinking but with certain controls and restrictions. Thus, each group consisted of participants who found the communication close to their own position, found it moderately discrepant from their own position, and found it extremely discrepant from their own position. The most opinion change occurred when there was a moderate discrepancy between the message and the opinion of individual members.

So what does influence conformity?

Informative and normative influence

Why did some campers in Yosemite respond to the mans screaM

Irving Piliavin and his associates63 supported my speculations about the campground experience. In their experiment, an accomplice of the experimenters staggered and collapsed in a New York City subway car, in the presence of several other people. The "victim" remained stretched out on the floor of the train, staring at the ceiling. This scene was repeated 103 times under a variety of conditions. The most striking result was that, a large part of the time, people spontaneously rushed to the aid of the victim, especially when he was made to seem obviously ill; in more than 95 percent of the trials, someone offered help immediately. Even when the victim had been given a liquor bottle to carry and was made to reek of alcohol, he received immediate help on 50 percent of the trials. Unlike the behavior of the participants that Darley and Latané dealt with, the helping behavior of the people on the subway train was not affected by the number of bystanders. People helped just as often and just as speedily on crowded trains (where there could have been a diffusion of responsibility) as they did on virtually empty trains. Although the people in the New York subway were in an environment as unlike Yosemite National Park as could be, the subway and the campground had two things in common: (1) people had the feeling of sharing a common fate, and (2) they were in a face-to-face situation with the victim from which there was no immediate escape

Attractiveness and persuasion?

Judson Mills and I62 did an experiment demonstrating that a beautiful woman — simply because she was beautiful — could have a major impact on the opinions of an audience on a topic wholly irrelevant to her beauty, and further, that her impact was greatest when she openly told the audience she wanted to influence them

Reference group adaptable study?

Likewise, students who move from politically conservative families to much more liberal environments when they go to college will often become more liberal in their attitudes, unless they maintain close connections with their more conservative reference group at home.46

Miligrams restudy with a non-authority figure

Of course, 48 percent is still a high figure. Would even fewer people have obeyed if the person conducting the experiment were not a scientist or another legitimate authority figure? Milgram addressed this question in another version of the study, in which the scientist-experimenter was replaced at the last minute by a nonauthoritative substitute. This time only 20 percent delivered the full set of shocks, demonstrating that for most people, only legitimate authority can command high obedience, not just any person assuming the role of authority

Conclusion Chimps and human social learning?

Once again we see how, in humans, the impulse to conform can trump a personal preference — even for chocolate

Texas example of appeal to identity

One of the most charming examples comes from a highly successful ad campaign that the state of Texas developed to get its citizens to stop littering. (The campaign was targeted especially to 18to 35-year-old males, who were the most likely to toss bottles and other junk out of their car windows.) Rather than put up signs saying "Don't litter," the Texas Department of Transportation crafted a slogan that tapped into the pride and sense of frontier don't-tread-on-me toughness that Texans are known for: Don't Mess With Texas. The phrase was prominently displayed on highways, television, radio, and print ads — and it worked. Litter on Texas highways dropped roughly 72 percent between 1986 and 1990.77

Much of the time, other people are an excellent source of information, and conforming satisfies our needs for both accuracy and belonging but often?

Our need to belong overrides our desire to be right

Zimbardo study on discrepancy

Philip Zimbardo81 recruited college women for an experiment, asking each one to bring a close friend with her to the laboratory. Each pair of friends was presented with a case study of a teenager who had committed a crime, and then each of the participants was asked, separately and in private, to indicate her recommendations on the matter. Each participant was led to believe her close friend disagreed with her — either by a small margin or by an extremely large margin. Zimbardo found that the greater the apparent discrepancy, the more the participants changed their opinions toward what they supposed were the opinions of their friends.

age and conformity neurological?

Pleasure centers in the brain are activated when peers are present, and without a fully developed prefrontal cortex to impose self-control, young people show a greater tendency to commit hazardous, foolish actions. As one expert on teen violence put it, "The stupidest creature to ever walk the face of the earth is an adolescent boy in the company of his peers.

Identification example

Rather, their opinions have become part of your belief system because you love those relatives so much and want to be like them. This phenomenon occurs often when we encounter the opinions of people we like or admire — even relative strangers.

? Dale Miller and Deborah Prentice68 have found that merely giving students accurate information about their fellow students' alcohol consumption and their true (negative) feelings about binge drinking did what..?

Reduced conformity and lowered drinking

Robert Caldini study on norms such as littering?

Robert Cialdini and his associates49 placed fliers under the windshield wipers of a number of cars and waited to observe what people did when they returned to their cars. Sometimes, an accomplice of the experimenters walked past them as they left the library, stooped down, picked up a discarded fast-food bag that was lying in the street, and placed it in a trashcan. In the control condition, no bag was lying on the ground; the accomplice simply walked past the people who were headed toward their cars. In that situation, when the people got to their car and noticed the flier, 37 percent threw it on the ground. In the food-bag modeling condition, only 7 percent threw it on the ground.

A real-life demonstration comes from the area of energy conservation. (Aronson student study on power of one specific example)

Several years ago, my students and I76 set out to persuade homeowners to make the improvements necessary to have an energy-efficient house. We worked with home auditors from local utility companies and taught them to use vivid examples when recommending home improvements. Most auditors, when left to their own devices, would merely point to cracks around doors and recommend that the homeowner install weather-stripping. Instead, we trained them to tell homeowners that if all the cracks around all the doors were added up, they would equal a hole the size of a basketball in their living room wall. "And if you had a hole that size in your wall, wouldn't you want to patch it up? That's what weatherstripping does." Auditors trained to use such lively language increased their effectiveness fourfold. Whereas previously only 15 percent of the homeowners had the recommended work done, after the auditors began to use more vivid language, 61 percent of the homeowners did.

This phenomenon of forewarning you are trying to persuade them was demonstrated in an experiment by Jonathan Freedman and David Sears

Teenagers were told they would be hearing a talk entitled "Why Teenagers Should Not Be Allowed to Drive." Ten minutes later, the speaker presented them with a prepared talk. In a control condition, he gave the same talk without the 10-minute forewarning. The teenagers in the control condition were more thoroughly convinced by what he said than were those who had been forewarned.

Conforming good for ancestor?

The inclination to harmonize with others by sacrificing personal wishes conferred a tremendous evolutionary advantage for our species; our ability to work in teams and transmit culture allowed humans to thrive. (startle on bird and they al flee)

Gregory Berns fMRI results?

These scans indicated a major difference between participants who resisted group pressure and those who yielded. Those who resisted showed heightened activity in the amygdala, a region of the brain associated with pain, fear, and emotional discomfort, showing that going against the group induces neural signals of physical pain,24 just as we saw that social rejection does.25

Carl Hovland and Walter Weiss on credibility

They asked large numbers of people to evaluate a claim that building nuclear-powered submarines was a feasible undertaking. (This experiment was done in 1951, when harnessing nuclear energy for such purposes was merely a dream.) Some were informed that the argument was made by a highly credible person, namely J. Robert Oppenheimer, a nationally known and highly respected atomic physicist; others were informed that the same argument came from a source with low credibility, namely Pravda, the official newspaper of the Communist Party in the then Soviet Union — a publication infamous for its lack of objectivity and truthfulness. Almost everyone who believed that the communication came from Oppenheimer changed their opinions, believing more strongly than they had in the feasibility of nuclear submarines. Very few of those who read the identical prediction attributed to Pravda shifted their opinions.

Distraction may influence willingness to help others Darley/Batson study

They enlisted divinity students at Princeton Theological Seminary, ostensibly for the purpose of recording a speech. Each student practiced his talk in one room; then he was instructed to walk to another building, where his presentation would be taped. At this point, some of the students were told they were late for their appointment and were hurried out. Others were told they were on time, and the rest that they had time to spare. On their way to the other building, the students encountered an apparent victim slumped in a doorway, with head down and eyes closed, coughing pathetically. More than half of these future ministers who were early or on time stopped to assist the victim, but only 10 percent of those who thought they were late for their appointment offered help — even when the speech they were to deliver included the parable of the Good Samaritan! Apparently the students were too distracted by their lateness and their mission to define the situation as enough of an emergency to get involved.

commitment study. y Morton Deutsch and Harold Gerard using the Asche paradigm

They found that when participants had made no prior commitment to a line choice, some 25 percent of the responses conformed to the erroneous judgment of the majority. But when the individuals had publicly committed themselves before hearing the judgment of the other "umpires," fewer than 6 percent of their new responses were conformist.

Results/conclusion of the chameleon study

This finding suggests that we mimic others because doing so both reflects and engenders feelings of closeness, creating a sort of "social glue."11 People who are especially skilled at changing their perspective, seeing the world through other people's eyes, are better chameleons — and thus better liked.12 But mimicry has to be done naturally; intentional efforts to mimic other people in order to win favor can backfire.13 It did for Hillary Clinton, who was criticized for adopting a Southern drawl (and saying "Y'all") when she campaigned in the South.14

Results/conclusion of James Dittes study?

Those who were led to feel only moderately accepted were more likely to conform to the norms set by the others than were those who were led to feel totally accepted. Once we've earned a secure place in the group, we relax and express our opinions more freely.

Aronson field experiment on conformity results/conclusion?

Thus, in an ambiguous situation, other people can induce us to conform by behaving in ways that let us know what "most people" do in that situation.

Daniel Haun study social learning

Toddlers in one study were given a ball and puzzle box with three ball-sized holes in it, and they learned quickly that putting the ball in a specific hole (e.g., the middle one) earned them a piece of chocolate. After this learning phase, each child joined a group of other toddlers who had learned to get their chocolate by dropping their ball into a different hole (e.g., the left one). During this second phase, the toddlers continued getting chocolate for putting the ball into the same hole as before, but many tended to conform to their peers instead, abandoning their learning — and the chocolate — in favor of conforming to the children who had learned a slightly different rule.

Aronsons response to these two studies with his own

We constructed an experiment in which we systematically investigated the size of the discrepancy and the credibility of the communicator within one research design.84 In this experiment, college women were asked to read several stanzas from obscure modern poetry and rank them in terms of how good they were. Then each woman was asked to read a criticism of modern poetry that specifically mentioned a stanza she had rated as poor. For some participants, the essayist described this particular stanza in glowing terms; this created a large discrepancy between the opinion of the communicator and the opinion voiced by the students. For other participants, the essayist was only mildly favorable in the way he described the stanza; this set up a moderate discrepancy between the essayist and the students. In a third condition, the essayist was mildly scornful in his treatment of the stanza, which placed the recipients of this communication in a milddiscrepancy situation. Finally, for half of the women in the experiment, the writer of the essay was identified as the renowned poet T. S. Eliot; for the other half, the writer was identified as a college student. Now all of the women ranked the stanzas once again. When they thought Eliot had written the essay, he had the most influence on their assessment when his evaluation of the stanza was most discrepant from theirs. When they thought a fellow student of medium credibility was the essayist, his views produced little opinion change when it was slightly discrepant from the opinion of the students, more change when it was moderately discrepant, and only a little opinion change when it was extremely discrepant. What, then, can we conclude about the interaction between a communicator's credibility and the audience's beliefs? When communicators have high credibility, the more likely it is that an audience will be persuaded by their arguments if there is a great discrepancy between the communicator's view and that of the audience. But when communicators have low credibility, the only way they will get an audience to go along is if their view is only moderately different from that of the audience.

Asche take on the study?

What if you were judging not an optical illusion but an obvious fact right in front of your eyes? Asch predicted that conformity would plummet.

Conclusion of Andrew Quinn study on accountability?

What this suggests is that most people will go along to get along — unless they know that they will be held accountable for a dumb, compliant decision.

Results of the paralell study on norms?

When the ground was covered in paper, the majority of the drivers simply followed suit — probably thinking, "After all, if no one cares about the cleanliness of the parking lot, why should I?" But they were least likely to litter if a single piece of paper lay on the ground nearby than if the parking lot was completely clean. Why might this be? The one piece of crumpled paper reminds us of the injunctive norm against littering — and shows us that the vast majority of people are following the norm of keeping the lot clean. If the parking lot is free of litter, most people probably do not even think about the norm and therefore are more likely to litter mindlessly.

Same study but with chimps

When the same experiment was conducted with chimps and orangutans, also highly social animals, they did not show these conformist tendencies; they stuck with the behavior that maximized their own rewards.

Nature of the group and conformity study (ethnicity)?

When white male college students were exposed to the unanimous (but erroneous) judgments of three peers in an Asch-like judgment task, they were more conforming when all three peers were white than when a person of another race was in the group. You might anticipate a real-life benefit of that finding: namely, that racial diversity can discourage groupthink.44

Stanley Schachter study Results?

Which participant do you think was most liked? The rebel? Not at all. It was the man who conformed most to the group norm; the deviant was liked least. Moreover, patterns of communication changed predictably: Early on in the discussion, the group spent considerable time trying to talk the deviant into accepting their point of view. But when it became clear the deviant wouldn't budge, the others largely ignored him, essentially cutting him out of the group discussion.

George hartmann study

demonstrated that individuals who received a primarily emotional message voted for the candidate endorsed by the message more often than did people who received a primarily logical message.

Instructions with fear campaign tetanus

a campaign conducted on a college campus urging students to get tetanus shots was divided into two conditions: (1) instructions only — where and when they were available, along with the location of the student health service and a suggestion that each student set aside a convenient time to stop by; and (2) instructions plus a high-fear appeal, describing the awful things that can happen to you if you don't get a protective tetanus shot. The instructions on their own increased the students' favorable attitudes toward tetanus shots and increased their stated intentions to get one. But instructions weren't enough to get them to do it. Fear was the necessary shot in the arm, so to speak. Of the students who were frightened about what might happen to them if they didn't have a tetanus shot and who were instructed about how and where to get one, 28 percent got the tetanus shots; but of those who received no specific instructions or a high-fear appeal, only 3 percent did. Similarly, Leventhal found that scaring smokers about the dangers of nicotine increased their intention to stop smoking. But unless that message was accompanied by recommendations about how to quit, it didn't change the smokers' behavior. Conversely, giving them specific things they could do when they had the urge to smoke, but without scaring them about health risks, was relatively ineffective. The combination of fear arousal and specific instructions produced the best results; four months later, the students in this condition were smoking less.

People with negative self-images may have difficulty coping with threats, which explains why...?

a high-fear communication overwhelms them and makes them feel like crawling into bed and pulling the covers up over their heads. They can deal more easily with low or moderate fear at the moment. But if given time — that is, if it's not essential that they act immediately — they will be more likely to act if the message truly scares the hell out of them

Miligram Experiment

an experiment devised in 1961 by Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, to see how far ordinary people would go to obey a scientific authority figure

Identification study Geoffrey Cohen and Michael Prinstein

asked high school students to participate in online chat room discussions with one another. One of the topics being discussed was what students would do if offered marijuana at a party. In one condition, the participants were led to believe that they were chatting with two popular and admired classmates from their school. In the other, these classmates were identified as students of merely average popularity. When the teenagers believed they were chatting with the popular classmates, they were far more likely to adopt their opinions. If the admired classmates said they would smoke the marijuana, the participants tended to agree that they would do so as well; if the admired classmates said they would refuse the marijuana, so did the participants. Unlike the kind of conformity in the Asch experiment, which was merely compliance, the influence here was durable; it was evident even later when participants were asked to give their opinions about marijuana in private.

Study on bystander effect: Bibb Latane

conducted an experiment constructed around a woman in distress. A young woman asked 120 male college students to fill out a questionnaire. She then retired to the next room, saying she would return when the students finished. A few minutes later, she staged an accident. The students heard the sound (from a hidden tape recording) of the young woman climbing a chair, followed by a loud scream and a crash, as if the chair had collapsed and she had fallen to the floor. They then heard moaning and crying and the anguished statement, "Oh, my God, my foot, I ... I can't move it. Oh ... my ankle ... I can't get this thing off me." The cries continued for about a minute and gradually subsided.

Christian Crandall study reference groups?

discovered an especially pernicious effect of group conformity when he examined the body image and eating patterns of women in two college sororities. Each sorority differed in its collective attitudes about the ideal female body image and whether binge eating and purging was a desirable way to maintain it. The powerful reference group of the sorority exerted pressure on its members to have the "right" body type (how thin to be) and the right behavior (how much bingeing was cool). The more the women hewed to the group ideal of looks and behavior, the more popular they were. Thus, if you were in a sorority where everyone thought you should be thin and yet eat a lot, you'd be more popular if you binged and purged.

Another way to increase trustworthiness is to create a situation where people do not think you are trying to persuade them. Festinger study

discovered when they staged a conversation between two graduate students in which one of them expressed his expert opinion on an issue. An undergraduate was allowed to overhear their conversation. In one experimental condition, participants knew that the graduate students were aware of their presence in the next room; therefore, they knew that anything being said could conceivably be intentionally designed to influence their opinion. In the other condition, the situation was arranged so that participants believed the grad students were unaware of their presence in the next room. In this condition, the participants' opinions changed significantly more in the direction of the opinion expressed by the grad students. After all, they knew what they were talking about — and weren't trying to change anyone's mind.

Whitaker

found a curvilinear relation between discrepancy and opinion change. By curvilinear, I mean that, as a small discrepancy increased somewhat, so did the degree of opinion change; but as the discrepancy continued to increase, opinion change began to slacken; and finally, as the discrepancy became large, the amount of opinion change became very small. When the discrepancy was very large, almost no opinion change was observed.

Abigail Baird conformity in adolescent girls?

found that if a popular girl in an adolescent peer group expresses an opinion — even a crazy one — her peers will frequently find a way to talk themselves into agreeing with her position. In one study, teenage girls were asked if it was a good idea to go swimming in the ocean if a shark had been spotted in the area. Individually, all the girls were adamant in their thinking — no way would they go in. But in groups, when Baird had the dominant girl answer the question by suggesting that it could be an exciting adventure, the other girls would start agreeing with her, constructing rationalizations for swimming with sharks

Schachter study follow up experiment by Arie Kruglanski and Donna Webster

found that nonconformists are especially disliked if they voice their dissent near a deadline, when groups are feeling the pinch to come to closure, than if they voice dissent earlier in the discussion.

Cohen, Aronson, Steele

found that people who had been given some self-affirming feedback (learning they are well liked on campus) were significantly more receptive to persuasive arguments attacking their beliefs.

Experiments led by Daniel Haun on social learning conclusion?

found that toddlers will copy the behaviors of their peers, even if it means ignoring prior learning and losing a reward.

Laurence Steinberg and his associates on age and conformity?

found that young adults were more likely to interpret risky behaviors — running a red light, using drugs and alcohol, shoplifting, and so on — as "exciting" rather than "dangerous" if they were with their peers at the time.

The behavior of the individuals in Asch's experiment, and in others where judgments are straightforward, seemed to be largely a matter of..?

going along to avoid the sense of exclusion. We can infer this from the fact that everyone gave their honest opinion about the line match when they were allowed to respond privately.

"So I could put on the tie and eat in the restaurant or I could leave, open-necked and comfortable but hungry. In this case as in many others, the negative consequences of nonconformity are made explicit. Likewise, Janis found in his studies of groupthink that?

one or two people typically step forward to enforce the norms of the group. These self-appointed mindguards, as Janis called them, encourage conformity and consensus. Much like the maître d' in the restaurant, mindguards make it clear that if you want to be included, you'll need to comply with the norms of the group.

Stanley Schachter study?

groups of male students met to discuss the case history and decide the fate of a teenager who had been arrested for breaking the law. After reading the case, each group was asked to discuss it and to come to an agreement regarding the young man's punishment on a scale ranging from "very lenient treatment" to "very harsh treatment." A typical group consisted of nine participants, six of whom were genuine and three of whom were paid confederates of the experimenter. The confederates took turns playing one of three roles that they had carefully rehearsed in advance: the modal person, who took a position that conformed to the average position of the real participants; the deviant, who took a position diametrically opposed to the general orientation of the group; and the slider, whose initial position was similar to the deviant's but who, in the course of the discussion, gradually "slid" into a modal, conforming position.

Chameleon effect study? (Tanya Chartrand and John Bargh)

had students discuss a set of photographs with a confederate who, at regular points during the interaction, either touched his face or shook his foot. Students paired with the face-touching partner touched their own faces significantly more often during the interaction; those paired with the foot-shaking partner were more likely to shake their own foot. In another session, the confederates either subtly mirrored the posture and mannerisms of the study participant — for example, by crossing their legs, touching their faces, or fiddling with their hair — or they did not. After this interaction, participants rated their partners, liking the chameleons more than the non-chameleons.

Study on mood of audience

in one study, when researchers approached individuals and asked for help with a marketing survey, only 29 percent agreed to participate. But when the researchers approached individuals and preceded that request with a simple, "Do you consider yourself a helpful person?", 77.3 percent later volunteered. Why? When asked before the request if they were helpful, nearly everyone answered yes. Then, when the request was made, most agreed to participate in order to be consistent with the recently activated identity of themselves as helpful people. Because people like to see themselves as helpful, it makes it difficult — dissonance arousing — to answer yes and then refuse to help. (You will recognize this as an example of the hypocrisy paradigm, described in Chapter 3.)

In one of many experiments on fear and persuasion, Howard Leventhal and his associates65 tried to

induce people to stop smoking cigarettes and to get chest Xrays. In the low-fear condition, some participants were simply given a recommendation to stop smoking and get X-rayed. In the moderate-fear condition, others were shown a film depicting a young man whose X-rays revealed he had lung cancer. And in the high-fear condition, people saw the same film but also another, more gory film of a lung-cancer operation. Those who were most frightened were also most eager to stop smoking and most likely to get X-rays.

Leventhal and his colleagues discovered that people who had a high opinion of themselves were most likely to be motivated to take immediate action when they were frightened. People with a low opinion of themselves, were

least likely to take immediate action — but (here is the interesting part) if there was a delay and they knew they could take action later, they behaved much like the participants with high self-esteem.

Experiments73 find that when people watch videos depicting real-life acts of kindness or moral beauty — such as a teacher who goes the extra mile for her students, or a poor child who gives money to a less fortunate child — they are

many times more likely to say yes to a request for help or money from another person. (This explains something I described in Chapter 1, when Joshua gave all his money to a panhandler after seeing a "morally elevating" movie, Schindler's List.)

Gregory Berns and his associates replicated Asch's procedures while monitoring participants'?

neural activity with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

Christopher Bryan and his colleagues78 have shown that

people are much more likely to vote if you change the phrasing of a preelection survey question from one about action ("How important is it for you to vote in the upcoming election?") to one about fulfilling an identity that people approve of ("How important is it for you to be a voter in the upcoming election?"). Similarly, children helped more when they were asked "Who wants to be a helper?" rather than "Who wants to help?" Such labels can reduce bad behavior as well. And as we saw in Chapter 3, people cheat less when prompted with the warning "Don't be a cheater" instead of being asked not to cheat. By getting people to think of an action — good or bad — in terms of their larger identity, they see the action as something central to who they are rather than as an occasional action. Such is the power of identity

Accountability study Andrew Quinn and Barry Schlenker

put people through a procedure aimed at producing conformity to a poor decision. Before the conformity aspect of the experiment began, the experimenters did two things: (1) they got half of their participants thinking about the importance of being as accurate as possible, while getting the other half thinking about the importance of cooperation; and (2) they told half of the participants in each of those two conditions that, after they made a decision, they would need to explain their reasoning to the group. The people who showed the most independence and made the best decisions were those who were oriented toward being accurate and had to explain their nonconformity to the very people whose influence they resisted. They behaved more independently than those who were oriented toward being accurate but were not held accountable.

Study on self-esteem and conformity? James Dittes and Harold Kelley38

recruited college men to join a prestigious group and subsequently informed them that the members could remove any participant, at any time, in the interest of efficiency. The group then got into a discussion of juvenile offending. Periodically, the discussion was interrupted and each member was asked to rate every other member's value to the group. After the discussion, each member was shown how the others rated him; in actuality, the members were given prearranged false feedback. Some members were led to believe they were well liked and accepted, and others were led to believe they were not terribly popular. Each member's degree of conformity was measured by the opinions he subsequently expressed in further discussion and by his vulnerability to group pressure during the performance of a simple perceptual task.

Paralell experiment of Calidini?

researchers eliminated the role model and instead manipulated the appearance of the parking lot — by littering it with fliers, leaving only a single piece of paper on the ground, or having it be completely clean.

Asche study with lines?

showed three lines and told to say which one is closest to one main line (x) The perceptual judgment itself was incredibly easy; when people were asked to judge the lines when they were alone, they made almost no errors. Indeed, the task was so easy, and the correct line was so obvious, that Asch himself firmly believed that there would be little, if any, yielding to group pressure. But his prediction was wrong. When faced with the fact of all of their fellow students agreeing on the same incorrect responses in a series of 12 judgments, approximately three-quarters of the participants conformed at least once by responding incorrectly. Over the entire spectrum of judgments, an average of 35 percent conformed to the incorrect judgments.

Not everyone is influenced by the same communicator study aronson and Burton Golden

sixthgrade children listened to a speech extolling the usefulness of arithmetic. The man giving the talk was introduced either as a prize-winning engineer from a prestigious university or as someone who washed dishes for a living. As you might expect, the engineer was far more effective at influencing the youngsters' opinions than the dishwasher was — hardly surprising or even interesting. But in addition, we varied his race. In some of the trials the communicator was white, and in others, black. Several weeks prior to the experiment, the children (all of whom were white) had filled out a questionnaire designed to measure their degree of prejudice against black people. The results were striking: Among those children who were most prejudiced against blacks, the black engineer was less influential than the white engineer, although both delivered the same speech. Moreover, among those children who were least prejudiced against blacks, the black engineer was more influential than the white engineer. You might think that, in a purely rational world, a prestigious engineer should be able to influence sixth-graders about the importance of arithmetic regardless of the color of his or her skin, but as you have been learning throughout this book, this is not a purely rational world. Depending upon the children's racial attitudes, they were either more influenced or less influenced by a black engineer than by an otherwise identical white engineer.

Testing this not scary enough idea? (Mathew McGlone)

tested this proposition, not by putting a moustache on global warming, but by putting one on another nonhuman threat: the swine flu virus that became a pandemic in 2009. In April of that year, in response to the rapidly spreading flu, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention made a series of recommendations, including frequent hand washing, avoiding contact with infected individuals, and above all, getting vaccinated. In the experiment, after these recommendations had been made but before the vaccine became available, McGlone and his team created informational pamphlets that varied in the way they presented facts about the swine flu. For half the people in the experiment, the flu was depicted as something that people contract ("Thousands of people may die from swine flu this year"). For the other half, the language was changed to depict the flu as a predator ("Swine flu may kill thousands of people this year"). People who received the pamphlet that described the flu as an active killer were significantly more likely to see the swine flu as frightening, more likely to see themselves as susceptible to it, and more likely to schedule a flu shot. Thus fear-inducing appeals are especially effective if they resonate with our evolutionary programming to fear being attacked by a threat that feels immediate and intentional

Listeners are also more receptive to a persuasive communication if

they are well fed, relaxed, happy, and feeling good about themselves. People who have been allowed to eat food they enjoy while reading a persuasive message are more influenced by what they read than are people in a control (noneating) group,90 and being in a good mood can make people more vulnerable to persuasion by making them less critical.91

Keizer experiment on norms?

to show that when environmental cues suggest that most people are disregarding the rules, bad behavior and norm-breaking are encouraged. Keizer's team left a large envelope hanging part way out of a public mailbox in an urban area of a city in the Netherlands, as though someone had hurriedly — and unsuccessfully — tried to mail the letter. A €5 bill showed through the address window in the envelope. Would passersby who saw it push the envelope into the mailbox, or would they steal the envelope with the money? The answer depended on a critical detail manipulated by the experimenters: Sometimes the mailbox had graffiti on it and there was litter strewn about the area; sometimes the mailbox and surrounding area were clean. In the clean-mailbox condition, only 13 percent of the passersby stole the envelope. With the graffiti and litter, 27 percent of the passersby stole the letter. (Still a low number — but this was, after all, in the Netherlands!) You may recognize this setup as a test of the "broken windows theory," which holds that when the environment sends the message that people don't care, the disorder spreads to human behavior.52 People seem to say to themselves, "Oh, what the hell. If others are going to behave irresponsibly, I might as well, too."

Conclusion?

we tend to like conformists better than nonconformists. This preference is not irrational.

Intrigued by this finding, Carl Hovland, O. J. Harvey, and Muzafer Sherif83 argued that if a particular communication differs too much from your own position — if it is, in effect, outside of your latitude of acceptance-

you will not be much influenced by it