Reference no: EM133203816

The Effect of Others

Spend time in any public space watching the crowds and you'll see examples of what scientists call social influence - the varied ways people change their behavior because of the presence of others. We are finely tuned to the people around us, relying on each other for cues about how to behave so that we can efficiently navigate our social environments. Social influence takes many different forms and strongly affects human behavior. Conformity, or going along with the crowd, is a natural and often useful tendency but can also have negative effects. As humans evolved to live in groups, we needed ways to smooth interactions, reduce conflict, and coordinate action. Conforming to the group can be a matter of survival. However, conformity can also lead to a bystander effect, where no one from a crowd steps forward to help in a situation where action is needed. The more people who witness an emergency, for example, the less chance that any of them will act, because they're all conforming to the group's behavior. People also conform and go along with the crowd to be liked and accepted, and that desire can be so strong that people sometimes agree with the group even when it goes against their own values or judgment. When the pressure from others is more direct, another type of social influence, compliance, impacts our behavior so that we respond to a person's explicit request. Social scientists have identified various compliance strategies. For example, if someone asks for a very small favor, and you comply, you're more likely to agree with a second, larger request. This is called the foot-in-the-door technique. It works because complying with the first request shapes or reinforces our self image of being helpful, and provides us with a rationale for agreeing to the second request. When pressure from others gets even stronger, it can lead to obedience, responding to a demand issued by an authority figure. The world is full of orders given by people who have power over us. The pressure to conform in such situations can be extreme, and obedience can have a dark side. In one famous experiment, a researcher set up a situation where subjects had to decide whether to follow orders to inflict1 pain on another person. The disturbing results showed how hard it is for people to resist authority. This experiment was done decades ago, in a different social time, so scientists recently ran a modified version of the study. The test subjects reacted similarly, confirming the powerful role of social influence. Social influence also plays an important role when people work in groups and can result in social loafing. One of the first people to study social loafing was a French agricultural engineer who noticed that adding more farm workers to a job didn't increase productivity as much as expected. In the early 1900s, he ran a series of simple experiments, having men pull carts either alone or together. The more men on the job, the less weight each one pulled individually. This tendency has been documented many times since, in various situations. There are many reasons why people don't vote, but social loafing can contribute to the problem. If you think that enough other people will vote and that the outcome will be fine without your participation, or that your vote doesn't really matter, that might be enough to keep you away from the polls. As you have seen, social influence can be positive, but it can also be negative. We should try to limit the negative effects. Some effective strategies to do so include ensuring that each person feels their effort is important and highlighting that personal efforts will improve group performance. In this way, we can take advantage of the positive effects while decreasing negative behavior. 1 Inflict (verb) to cause 2 Interdependence (noun) the act of relying on others

Question1 Summary #3 This is your final summary for this semester. Make sure you incorporate everything you reviewed last week to do your very best.

1. Read the passage, "The Effect of Others." You can print it out to annotate or make a copy to your google drive and annotate it on your computer.

2. Create an outline for your summary with the main idea of the reading, major and minor details, and a concluding thought. Remember to paraphrase the author's original ideas You should keep key terms and do not need to paraphrase those.

3. Then write a summary of 6-8 sentences in a word processing document.

4. Make sure you include all of the elements that you learned are necessary for strong summarization. Review the lessons in weeks 1- 3 and the review in week 9 if necessary. Use the summary handout as a checklist.