PSYCH 160 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Normative Social Influence
Document Summary
Every moment of our life, we are doing something matching with the people around us. Conformity: maintaining or changing one"s behavior due to the real or imagined influence of others. Many theorists believe that conformity is an evolved mechanism. It allows us to figure out what to do in given situations that we"re not familiar with. 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 behavior. Rush to mimic people--increases chance of survival (learned to stay in caves) For a long time, psychologists believed that we conformed because there often isn"t a true appropriate behavior or responses in most situations. This ambiguity has proven to impact behavior in past experiments. When people asked how much it was moving, they gave certain lengths. They gave the lengths alone (1 time), then in groups (3 times) Their estimates got closer and closer to each other"s.
