Social Influence

Conforming- Adjusting one's behavior or thinking to coincide with a group standards.

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

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 one's willingness to accept other's opinions about reality.

Group Influence on Behavior

Social Facilitation- Improved performance of tasks in the presence of others. It occurs with simple or well learned tasks, not with tasks that are difficult or not yet learned.

Yerkes-Dodson Law- There's an optimal level of arousal for the best performance of any task.

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.

Deindividuation- The loss of self-awareness and self-restraint occurring in group situations that faster arousal and anonymity.
Group Polarization- The concept that a group's attitude is one of extremes and rarely moderate.
Groupthink- The mode of thinking that occurs when 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 ways that induce the others to appear to confirm the belief.