1. Conformity and Adolescence
Topic: What shapes our behavior?
Do Now: Let’s say you witness a behavior (a fight in the hall, for example), as we do everyday. What explanations do you give for why people act they way they do?

2. Compliance Strategies – ways to get people to do what you want them to do

3. Door in the face technique –
compliance is gained by starting with a larger, unreasonable request that is turned down and then a smaller, more reasonable request is asked.

4. Compliance Strategies
Foot-in-the-Door Phenomenon
tendency for people who have first agreed to a small request to comply later with a larger request

5. Social Influence Conformity Normative Social Influence
adjusting one’s behavior or thinking to coincide with a group standard
Normative Social Influence
influence resulting from a person’s desire to gain approval or avoid disapproval

6. Asch’s conformity experiments

7.
Groupthink – term the explains people’s unwillingness to disagree with a group decision for fear of social punishment

8. Milgram’s Study of Obedience

9. The Milgram Experiment (1963):
Measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience.
Study found large percentage of people committed acts against their conscience due to authority. 9

10. Milgram’s follow-up obedience experiment

11. Real-World Implications of Milgram’s Research
Discussion: Who can define the term ‘genocide’?
What are some infamous genocides of the 20th (or 21st) centuries?

12. The “Banality of Evil” Phrase coined by Hannah Arendt
Great evils in history were/are not executed by fanatics but by ordinary people who accepted the premises of their state.

13. Stanford Prison Experiment - 1971
Psychological social experiment that intended to see what role authority plays in moral behavior (if any)
1/2 participants were ‘guards’, 1/2 were ‘prisoners’
Study stopped after 2 weeks due to ethnical dilemmas of participants behavior – guards acting cruelly towards ‘prisoners’

14. The use of ID numbers was a way to make prisoners feel anonymous
The use of ID numbers was a way to make prisoners feel anonymous. Each prisoner had to be called only by his ID number and could only refer to himself and the other prisoners by number 14

15. “…our prisoners expected some harassment, to have their privacy and some of their other civil rights violated while they were in prison” 15

16. “Blindfolded and in a state of mild shock over their surprise arrest by the city police, our prisoners were put into a car and driven to…[jail]…” 16

17. “Push-ups were a common form of physical punishment imposed by the guards to punish infractions of the rules or displays of improper attitudes toward the guards or institution…” 17

18. “…they carried a whistle around their neck and a billy club borrowed from the police. Guards also wore special sun-glasses, an idea I borrowed from the movie Cool Hand Luke. Mirror sunglasses prevented anyone from seeing their eyes or reading their emotions” 18

21. Other Social Influences on Behavior

22. Reading on ‘Stereotype Threat” (Gladwell)
Social Facilitation
improved performance of tasks in the presence of others
occurs with simple or well-learned tasks but not with tasks that are difficult or not yet mastered
Reading on ‘Stereotype Threat” (Gladwell)

23. Social Loafing
The tendency for people in a group to exert less effort when pooling efforts toward a common goal than if they were individually accountable.

24. Deindividuation People get swept up in a group and lose sense of self.
Feel anonymous and aroused.
Explains rioting behaviors.