Social Influence

Social influence is the process by which an individual’s attitudes, beliefs, or behavior are modified by the presence or action of others. We have all your revision notes in one place, alongside example exam questions and answers.

Normative social influence is usually associated with compliance, where a person changes their public behavior but not their private beliefs. Informational social influence refers to the tendency to conform to what others are doing or saying because we perceive them as a source of accurate information

Obedience is a form of social influence where an individual acts in response to a direct order from another individual, who is usually an authority figure. It is assumed that without such an order, the person would not have acted in this way.

The Asch paradigm was a series of conformity experiments by Solomon Asch designed to investigate how social pressure from a majority group could influence an individual to conform.

Zimbardo and his colleagues (1973) were interested in finding out whether the brutality reported among guards in American prisons was due to the sadistic personalities of the guards (i.e., dispositional) or had more to do with the prison environment (i.e., situational).