Obeience

- Conformity is one way that people influence us.
- Another way is obedience, when people change their behaviour because someone tells them to.
- Obedience can lead to people violating their own principles e.g. Nazi death camps
- People with high authoritarian personalities are most likely to be obediant.
- Prejudiced against various minority groups
- They believe that the world is best governed by a system of power and dominance in which each of us must submit to those above us and show harshness to those below.

Motivated Social Cognition
- People respond to threat and uncertainty by expressing beliefs that help them manage their concerns.

Situations and Obedience
- In the Nazi death camps the some of the Nazis following Hitlers commands were just normal people with no hate in them, they were simply obiding by the rules.

What makes a situation influential?
How coercive does a situation have to be to elicit monstrous acts?
- Milgram example showed that is takes very little to get people to obey extreme and inhumane commands.
- Some participants may have felt that it was the experimenter who was in control of the situations and the shocks not the participants themselves.
- With 2 teacher roles one a confederate issuing the shock and the other reading out the words to be repeated 90% of participants went to the limit of shocks.
- Dehumanization of the victims helped making the teachers job easier, also reducing the guilt.
- There are two reasons that participants give to let themselves off the moral hook
1) They weren't doing the shocking
2) They only perceived the victims as objects not a person.

Compliance
- When we conform we change our behaviors because of pressures form a group or commands from authority.
- Compliance is a third type of social influence and occurs when people change their behaviour because someone merely asks them to.
- We feel most compelled to comply when the person asking us to comply has done something for us and we are indebted to them (Cialdini (1993).
That's not all technique
- Produces compliance by starting with a modest offer and then improving on it making people want to conform/agree to the plan.
Norm of reciprocity
- Simply feeling the need to conform to something someone wants you to do because you are indebted to the person,

Cupcake example- Someone selling cupcakes but then offer cookies as well with the purchase people were nearly teice as more likely to purchase the cupcakes. Burger (1986).

	Created by Riya Vaidya over 9 years ago

Motivated Social Cognition Situation and Obedience What makes a situation influential Compliance That's not- all technique