Exam 8: Conformity and Obedience: Influencing Behavior

The United States has celebrated independence and rugged individualism from the time of its inception. This suggests that American attitudes toward conformity are __________.

You can build tolerance, over time, by conforming to group norms. Then, on some occasion when you deviate from the group, you will not suffer any retribution. These "credits" are referred to as __________.

According to the authors of your text, Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi official responsible for transporting Jews to death camps, can best be described as __________.

It could be argued that participants in Muzafer Sherif's (1936) study converged in their estimates of the amount of movement of a point of light because they were avoiding public embarrassment or social censure from other participants. Sherif demonstrated that this was unlikely when he found similar results __________.

Recall that Solomon Asch (1951, 1956) asked participants to estimate the lengths of lines. In response to the incorrect answers of others, some participants actually denied what their eyes saw. These studies provide evidence of __________.

Informational social influence is most likely to play a significant role in which of the following situations?

Moibi participates in two groups at school. One is the chess club. She is not very attached to this group and really only joined because they meet on Tuesdays and she needed to find something to do until 5 that day of the week. Moibi also is a cheerleader. Most of the other cheerleaders are her very close friends. If Moibi disagreed with a decision made by each of these two groups, what would be the most likely outcome, according to social impact theory?

Execution teams who work at prisons tend to deny personal responsibility for the executions and state that they are just following orders. Such justifications for taking a human life illustrate that when people obey authority they can __________.

Victor goes to a fancy French restaurant. There are utensils on the table that he's never even seen before, and more spoons and forks than he's ever seen on one table. Eager to dine in an appropriate and sophisticated way, Victor secretly watches other diners to see what they do. This is an example of __________.

You have been hired to help design a campaign to get people to conserve energy. Based on the research by Nolan and colleagues (2008), what is the most effective way to convince people to conserve?

Informational social influence does not always produce conformity, but informational conformity is more likely in some situations than in others. What factors increase conformity to informational social influence?

Majorities tend to rely on __________, whereas minorities tend to rely on __________.

The major downside risk of informational social influence is that the more __________ the situation is, the more we rely on others who are no more likely to be knowledgeable or accurate than we ourselves are, leading us each to adopt others' mistakes and misinterpretations.

Milgram found that about __________ percent of his participants went all the way to 450 volts in his original experiment.

According to research presented in the text (Baron et al., 1996), participants were asked to select perpetrators after a lineup in conditions of high ambiguity; the perpetrator wore different clothing in the lineup than in the original photo, and the slides were shown very quickly. Recall also that some participants were told that the task was one that was being designed for use by the police department and were offered $20 if they were the most accurate, while others were told that it was just a laboratory task under development. This study demonstrated that __________.

Cross-cultural replications of Solomon Asch's original (1951) conformity studies (in which participants gave public judgments of the lengths of lines) have revealed that __________.

Believing that others are right is to __________ as conforming without believing is to __________.

Mass psychogenic illness, when many people in a group suddenly begin to feel sick, shows the power of __________.

A(n) __________ norm concerns our perceptions of the way people actually behave in a given situation, regardless of whether others approve or disapprove of the behavior.

According to your text, what seems to drive an idea "going viral" through social influence?