Blog Post #13

I thought the experiments were all very clever, and it is a good idea to try and figure out why people conform and in what situations. All experiments showed similar results; people will conform to a group or situation and do what they are told. Most of the people who participated did conform and it was a larger number than expected by psychologists. In Asch's conformity experiment, most of the people agreed with the others who purposely said the wrong line. It is interesting that they agreed because they clearly thought something differently and were agreeing to a wrong answer just to fit in. In Milgram's obedience experiment, the teachers thought they were causing harm to a person, and they continued to do it just because they were told to. They could hear the pain and agony from the student and did not want to continue the experiment but not very many quit the experiment. A shocking 2/3 of the people in the experiment went all the way to the end even though they thought they were giving a very horrible shock to someone. It is amazing that so many people would be obedient even when they were knowingly cause harm to someone. It is kind of like the saying: "If your friends jumped off a roof, would you do it too?" If that saying were like the results of this experiment, most people would jump off the roof. In the Stanford Prison experiment, the guards and prisoners lost sense of reality and played their actual rolls. The guards were cruel and the prisoners obeyed their every command. The studies show that it is human nature to conform to what others are doing in order to fit in. I believe people do this to save themselves from the embarassment of being wrong or different.

Social influence is a great power and has to do with conformity, compliance, and group behavior. It is the influence is when a person's actions are affected by other people. Normative social influence is influence resulting from a person's desire to gain approval or avoid disapproval. Informational social influence is influence resulting from one's willingness to accept other's opinions about reality. An example is during a class election; voting for someone just because everyone else is, even though you know they are not the best candidate. Another example is if you are hanging out with friends and they are drinking; you drink too so you can fit in, even though you know there may be consequences. An example from my life is during class discussions or quizzes. I have gone along with answers that other people said even though I originally thought something different.

The most interesting thing I learned in this class is the other-race effect. This is the tendency to recall faces of one's own race more accurately than the faces of other races. I find this interesting because this is something I often do. I cannot tell the difference between Asian people and I know many other white people can't either, but I didn't know that it had a name until chapter 16. It is also interesting that it emerges during infancy, between 3 and 9 months of age. Babies become own-race biased before they even know the differences between the races. This is kind of sad and is probably a major reason for racial prejudice.