Unit III: Social Psychology II

Social Influence-----
Conformity
• adjusting ones behavior or thinking to counad with a group standard

Conditions that strengthen conformity
• One is made to feel incompetent
• Group is at least three people
• Group is unanimous
• One admires the groups status
• One had made no prior commitment

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 optional leek of arousal for the best performance of any task:
• easy task--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 individually 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 groups attitude is one of extremes and rarely moderate
• as a group, both the Black Panthers and the Klu Klux Klan are more extreme than the average individual in the group

Groupthink
• The mode of thinking that ours when the desire for harmony in a decision-making group overrides common sense

Self-fulfilling Prophecies
• Occurs when one persons belief about others leads one to act in ways that induce the others to appear to confirm the belief

Social Relations-----
- Attraction
-Conflict and Prejudice

Prejudice
~ an unjustifiable attitude towards a groups of people
~ Usually involves stereotyped beliefs
~ ( a generalized belief about a group of people)
~ "all white people are stupid"
~ OVERT or SUBTLE

Social inequalities
• INGROUP: "us"- people with whom one shares a common identity
• OUTGROUP: "them"- those perceived as different than ones in-group

• INGROUP BIAS: the tendency to favor ones own group