Exam 8: Conformity: Influencing Behavior

In the "Johnny Rocco" studies conducted by Schachter (1951), he found that when a confederate stubbornly deviated from the opinion of the rest of the group, the confederate then was more likely to

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

Zahra lives in a country with a very unpredictable food supply. She is heavier than the typical woman in her area. According to research, why would she be so attractive in her culture?

Which of the following types of conformity pressures induced most of the participants in Stanley Milgram's obedience studies to deliver escalating and life-threatening shocks to an innocent learner?

Even though the authors point to a number of situational variables that contributed to the destructive obedience of Stanley Milgram's participants (e.g., normative and informational conformity pressures, conflicting norms), it might still be argued that people have, lurking deep within them, sadistic tendencies that can easily be elicited by situational variables. What experimental findings by Milgram call this "personal attribution" into question?

Burger (2009) recently 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?

When "Freedom Riders" conformed with their group of fellow civil rights activists, they conformed by behaving ________, but when soldiers in the Vietnamese village of My Lai conformed, they behaved ________, illustrating that conformity itself it not always simply good or bad.

Why would Muzafer Sherif, a social psychologist, choose the autokinetic effect (a perceptual illusion) to study social conformity? He wanted

Recall that Muzafer Sherif (1936) used the autokinetic effect to measure participants' estimates of the apparent movement of a stationary spot of light. In what sense did Sherif's findings illustrate informational social influence?

In a series of experiments, why did Solomon Asch (1951, 1956) ask participants to judge the lengths of lines that were clearly different from one another? Asch

________ norms address people's perceptions of what other people approve of, whereas ________ norms address people's perceptions of what other people actually do.

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

Despite public outcry and rigorous ethical guidelines on research, Burger (2009) recently did a replication of Milgram's studies on obedience. How was Burger able to conduct these studies?

In essence, normative social influence arises from humans' fundamental

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

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

Itsuki, a Japanese teenager, has withdrawn from all social interaction. He is referred to as a hikikomori. The most likely reason for his withdrawal is as a result of

The Asch line studies were conducted over fifty years ago, and society has changed quite a bit. A recent study involving fMRI and the line judgment task attempted to replicate some of Asch's results. What were the results of this study?

The authors of your text describe a series of horrible telephone hoaxes that were done a few years ago in which a caller falsely identified himself as a police officer and had restaurant managers perform unnecessary strip searches and other degrading acts on subordinates. The fact that the managers he called actually did what he instructed them to do illustrates that people very readily

If you wanted to alter the cleaning behavior of your roommates using a technique similar to Shultz and his colleagues (2007), you could give them feedback about injunctive norms using which of the following methods?