Exam 8: Conformity and Obedience: Influencing Behavior

The norm in your large psychology class is that students will remain quiet enough for others to hear the professor and one another during lectures and discussions. When you talk loudly to the person next to you and violate the norm, like the deviant in Stanley Schachter's "Johnny Rocco" study, you can expect that your classmates will first __________.

According to the authors of your text, once participants in Milgram's studies delivered the first shock to the learner, they created internal pressure to obey. This idea is very similar to another technique introduced earlier in the chapter. What is this technique?

Amanda is assigned to a group to take a quiz (which actually doesn't count towards the course grade). For one of the questions, she is certain the correct answer is C, but the rest of her group all says the answer is A. Based on information about the Asch line studies, how would Amanda be likely to respond?

Based on research by Goldstein and colleagues (2008), which of the following techniques would be most effective in getting hotel guests to reuse their bath towels?

In a field study by Shultz and his colleagues (2007), several households in a neighborhood received weekly feedback about their level of energy consumption relative to their neighbors. Some households received only descriptive norm feedback, and some received descriptive and injunctive norm feedback. Which method of feedback was most effective in producing energy conservation?

According to your text, a hoax phone call to a McDonald's resulted in an employee being strip searched, because the manager believed the caller was a police officer. This story introduces the idea that people will do extraordinary things to direct requests. Most importantly, people will make choices against their beliefs when faced with one of the strongest forms of social influence, known as __________.

Which student below is being exposed to an attempt to change behavior based on the "social norms" approach?

The "social norms" approach to reducing binge drinking on college campuses relies primarily on the use of __________.

Burger (2009) conducted a replication of Milgram's studies on obedience. One of the modifications to Milgram's original method was that Burger stopped the study after participants had reached 150 volts (rather than 450). Why did he choose the 150-volt cut-off point?

Explain how both normative and informational social influence worked to convince Stanley Milgram's participants to deliver powerful shocks to a hapless learner. How did replications of the original study demonstrate the role of normative and informational influence?

In a variation of his standard experiment, Solomon Asch (1957) found that when participants could write their responses on a piece of paper, conformity dropped dramatically. This finding indicates that participants exhibited __________, not __________, during the standard experiment.

In Burger's (2009) replication of Milgram's studies on obedience to authority, he included both men and women. Milgram included women in only one of his studies. Which of the following is true about the gender differences Burger found?

Private acceptance is __________.

In 1975, Cialdini and colleagues asked college students to spend two hours chaperoning a group of children on a field trip to the zoo. Only __________ agreed to this request. However, after first asking another group of college students to volunteer every week, for a minimum of two years, __________ agreed to the second request to chaperon the zoo trip because of the door-in-the-face technique.

Alejandro has changed his behavior because of the real or imagined presence of others. This is known as __________.

Which of the following is an example of a social norm in mainstream U.S. culture?

Which of the following is NOT an example of informational social influence?

According to the authors of your text, in part because the experimental procedures were so __________, it was difficult for participants in Stanley Milgram's obedience experiments to abandon the "obey legitimate authority" norm in favor of the norm that says, "Do no harm."

Emily is a member of a collectivist culture, and she has just conformed with her social group. That behavior is considered a(n) __________.

Solomon Asch (1951, 1956) embarked on a series of studies in which participants were asked to estimate the lengths of lines that clearly differed in length. Asch originally undertook these experiments to __________.