Question 1

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

Accepted Answer

A)  be voted as the leader. 
B)  be suspected of playing the role of a confederate in the study. 
C)  be voted out of the group. 
D)  experience a large amount of cognitive dissonance.

Question 2

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

Accepted Answer

A)  informational social influence; normative social influence 
B)  normative social influence; informational social influence 
C)  normative social influence; idiosyncrasy credits 
D)  informational social influence; conversion

Question 3

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?

Accepted Answer

A)  Heavy women are perceived as healthy and fertile. 
B)  Women are not subservient to men. 
C)  Physical fitness is impossible to attain, and therefore not associated with attractiveness. 
D)  The media have not made inroads into the popular culture.

Question 4

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?

Accepted Answer

A)  informational influence 
B)  normative influence 
C)  mindless conformity 
D)  both informational and normative social influence

Question 5

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?

Accepted Answer

A)  When participants could choose the level of shock, they administered very low levels. 
B)  Violent prisoners administered lower shocks than non-prisoner participants. 
C)  There are cultural differences in the amount of shock participants administer. 
D)  When the learner was introduced as a minister, participants gave lower shocks.

Question 6

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?

Accepted Answer

A)  In Milgram's work, participants who were going to disobey usually did so by 150 volts. 
B)  Burger actually had the participants hooked up to the shock device with the learner, and 150 volts is quite painful. 
C)  150 volts of electricity sounds very painful to participants. 
D)  150 volts of electricity actually isn't painful at all.

Question 7

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.

Accepted Answer

A)  violently; nonviolently 
B)  emotionally; logically 
C)  peacefully; violently 
D)  as individuals; as a group

Question 8

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

Accepted Answer

A)  to construct a situation that was ambiguous. 
B)  participants to feel pressure to obey his instructions. 
C)  to use a dark room to foster a sense of cohesion in the group. 
D)  to study the influence of perceptions on social behavior.

Question 9

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?

Accepted Answer

The answer of Recall that Muzafer Sherif (1936) used the...

Question 10

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

Accepted Answer

A)  wanted to study conformity in ambiguous situations. 
B)  believed that people would conform in their judgments. 
C)  wanted to study conformity in unambiguous situations. 
D)  believed that Muzafer Sherif's experiments were fatally flawed.

Question 11

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

Accepted Answer

A)  Descriptive; injunctive 
B)  Descriptive; subjective 
C)  Injunctive; descriptive 
D)  Proscriptive; injunctive

Question 12

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

Accepted Answer

A)  internally justify their actions. 
B)  externally justify their actions. 
C)  control the situation psychologically. 
D)  influence others to do so as well.

Question 13

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?

Accepted Answer

A)  He conducted them outside of the U.S. 
B)  He did an archival analysis. 
C)  He made several changes to adhere to modern ethical guidelines. 
D)  He lied to the Institutional Review Board.

Question 14

In essence, normative social influence arises from humans' fundamental

Accepted Answer

A)  selfishness, which must be kept in check. 
B)  need for companionship, affection, and acceptance. 
C)  need for accurate perceptions and beliefs about a confusing world. 
D)  desire to submit to knowledgeable authorities.

Question 15

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

Accepted Answer

A)  because humans are a social species, normative conformity pressures are universal. 
B)  people's conformity in these situations varies depending on the culture in which they were reared. 
C)  cultures differ in the extent to which private acceptance follows from public compliance. 
D)  implicit conformity pressures vary from culture to culture, but explicit pressures do not.

Question 16

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

Accepted Answer

A)  generally positive. 
B)  situation-specific. 
C)  generally negative. 
D)  interdependent.

Question 17

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

Accepted Answer

A)  academic failure. 
B)  being from a dishonored family. 
C)  being an illegitimate child. 
D)  being bullied severely.

Question 18

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?

Accepted Answer

A)  People today are more susceptible to conformity than people fifty years ago. 
B)  People today are less susceptible to conformity than people fifty years ago. 
C)  Results suggested that people no longer conform. 
D)  Results were very similar to those of Asch's original studies.

Question 19

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

Accepted Answer

A)  give up personal freedoms in this post 9/11 world. 
B)  follow their stereotypes. 
C)  will obey someone they think is in authority. 
D)  seek opportunities to exploit those with less power.

Question 20

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?

Accepted Answer

A)  You can tell each how they have behaved relative to one another. 
B)  You can provide them information about how to correctly behave. 
C)  You can put a smiley or sad face drawing on a report about their behavior. 
D)  You can put a sign on the door of the roommate who behaved the best.

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 .