Social Influence

Conformity: adjusting one's behavior or thinking to coincide with a group standard

Conditions that strengthen conformity
-one is made to feel incompetent
-group is at least 3 people
-group is unanimous
-one admires the group's status
-one had made no pitot 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 ones willingness to accept others opinions about reality

Group influence on behavior
Social facilitation: improved performance of tasks in the presence of others
-occurs with simple or well learned tasks
-not with tasks that are difficult or not yet mastered

Yerkes-Dodson law: there is an optimal level of arousal for the best performance of any task;
-easy tasks-relatively high
-difficult tasks-low arousal
-other tasks-moderate level

Social loafing: the tendency for people in a group to exert less effort when pooling efforts toward a common goal than if they were indicidually 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

group think: the mode of thinking that occurs then the desire for harmony in a decision making group overrides common sense

self fulfilling prophecies: occurs when one person's belief about others leads one to act in way that induce the others to appear to confirm the belief