Social Influence Me and My Gang

1. Social InfluenceMe and My Gang Who or what influences you??

2. Throughout my life I have noticed that I act differently around different groups of people. • Around my family I act quiet and reserved. • Around friends I act silly and fun. • But, around my fellow teachers and students at school I talk about curriculum and study skills for the AP test. • In other words, the people around us affect the way we behave.

3. Group Influence on Behavior Lets look at how groups effect our behavior.

4. When are you most likely to do your best?? • Social Facilitation • Improved performance oftasks in the presence of others. • Occurs when one is very skilled at a task or it is a very easy task • Take Lebron. He is very good in basketball and when he is practicing alone I am sure he looks pretty good. • But because he is so skilled, he actually performs better in front of a group of people. • social impairment • when a task is very hard or one is not skilled (not to much unlike my basketball ability), one performs worse in front of a group than if they were alone.

5. Conformity • Adjusting one’s behavior or thinking to coincide with a group standard. How did you feel the first time someone asked you to smoke, drink, or skip class?

6. Asch’s Study

7. 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

8. A desire to gain approval or avoid disappointment of others (acceptance or rejection) -Normative Social Influence Influence resulting from one’s willingness to accept others’ opinions about reality - Informational Social Influence Reasons for Conforming • Wanting a material or social reward such as a pay raise or votes

9. Obedience • compliance with commands given by an authority figure Milgram’s Experiments

10. Milgram’s Obedience Study

11. Why do People Obey Immoral Commands?? • Legitimization of Authority • We are taught to obey authority figures and not to question or second-guess them • Social Validation • We use other people’s behavior as a standard for judging the appropriateness of our own actions • We may see that someone is admired for their behavior so we use that to legitimize our behavior and even look up to those people even more

12. What did we learn from Asch & Milgram? Ordinary people can do shocking things

13. Other Issues in Group Dynamics

14. Social Loafing Sometimes people take advantage of being in a group • The tendency to put forth less effort when working as a member of a group than when working alone • think of the last time you did a group project – you may have worked less because if the group did badly it was not a direct reflection of your skills, but the group as a whole

15. Deindividuation • The loss of self-awareness and self-restraint occurring in group situations • People lose inhibitions and sense of responsibility and feel anonymous – mobs, riots, and looting. • Behave in a way you usually would not Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment

16. Group Polarization the tendency of people to make decisions that are more extreme when they are in a group as opposed to a decision alone or independently

17. Groupthink • Occurs when the desire for harmony in a decision-making group overrides common sense. • Members pressure others to conform • Members squash dissent and focus just on information that agrees with the group’s point of view How could hazing incidents be an example of groupthink?

18. Self-Fulfilling Prophecies • Occurs when one person’s belief about others leads one to act in ways that induce the others to appear to confirm the belief. If you think someone finds you attractive, they more likely will!!!

19. Prejudice and Discrimination • Prejudice = attitude • Discrimination = behavior

20. Prejudice • An unjustifiable attitude towards a group of people. • Usually involves stereotyped beliefs (a generalized belief about a group of people). Overt Subtle

21. Why is there prejudice? • Vivid Cases (Availability Heuristic) • The Just-World Phenomenon • People get what they deserve in this world

22. Social Inequalities(A principle reason behind prejudice) • Ingroup: “us”- people with whom one shares a common identity. • Outgroup: “them”- those perceived as different than one’s ingroup. • Ingroup bias: the tendency to favor one’s own group.

23. Scapegoat Theory • The theory that prejudice provides an outlet for anger by providing someone to blame.

24. #3