Obeience

- Conformity is one way that people influence us.
- Another way is obedience, when people change their behaviour because someone tells them to.
- Obedience can lead to people violating their own principles e.g. Nazi death camps
- People with high authoritarian personalities are most likely to be obediant.
- Prejudiced against various minority groups
- They believe that the world is best governed by a system of power and dominance in which each of us must submit to those above us and show harshness to those below.

Motivated Social Cognition
- People respond to threat and uncertainty by expressing beliefs that help them manage their concerns.

Situations and Obedience
- In the Nazi death camps the some of the Nazis following Hitlers commands were just normal people with no hate in them, they were simply obiding by the rules.

What makes a situation influential?
How coercive does a situation have to be to elicit monstrous acts?
- Milgram example showed that is takes very little to get people to obey extreme and inhumane commands.
- Some participants may have felt that it was the experimenter who was in control of the situations and the shocks not the participants themselves.
- With 2 teacher roles one a confederate issuing the shock and the other reading out the words to be repeated 90% of participants went to the limit of shocks.
- Dehumanization of the victims helped making the teachers job easier, also reducing the guilt.
- There are two reasons that participants give to let themselves off the moral hook
1) They weren't doing the shocking
2) They only perceived the victims as objects not a person.

Compliance
- When we conform we change our behaviors because of pressures form a group or commands from authority.
- Compliance is a third type of social influence and occurs when people change their behaviour because someone merely asks them to.
- We feel most compelled to comply when the person asking us to comply has done something for us and we are indebted to them (Cialdini (1993).
That's not all technique
- Produces compliance by starting with a modest offer and then improving on it making people want to conform/agree to the plan.
Norm of reciprocity
- Simply feeling the need to conform to something someone wants you to do because you are indebted to the person,

Cupcake example- Someone selling cupcakes but then offer cookies as well with the purchase people were nearly teice as more likely to purchase the cupcakes. Burger (1986).

	Created by Riya Vaidya about 10 years ago

Motivated Social Cognition Situation and Obedience What makes a situation influential Compliance That's not- all technique

L8 Social Psychology - Obedience