The person least likely to conform to the majority opinion would be someone who disagrees with

Normative social influence leads people to conform out of fear of the negative consequences of appearing deviant. Indeed, to avoid standing out from the rest of the group and risking embarrassment, individuals will often conform to the majority even if they think the majority is wrong. Alternatively, informational social influence leads people to conform when they believe others are correct in their judgments. In this case, they conform to the majority because they assume that the relatively large number of people holding a particular opinion or behaving in a particular way suggests that these people are correct. The primary influence found in Sheriff's study was informational because the situation was rather ambiguous for the participants. They could not be sure how far the dot of light really moved, so they looked to the other participants to provide information about the correct answers. Even when participants in Sheriff's study were later asked to make the same judgments alone (where there would be little pressure against deviating from a group norm), they continued to make judgments consistent with the group norm; this suggests that the participants conformed to the group norm because of the information provided earlier. In Asch's study, however, normative influence played the bigger role. Here, the situation was not ambiguous; the correct answers were obvious to the participants. Not needing the other people in the group to provide them with answers that they already knew, the participants were not particularly vulnerable to informational influence. Rather, Asch's participants were concerned about deviating from the opinions expressed by a unanimous majority. Indeed, when these participants were asked to write down their answers privately, their levels of conformity dropped sharply.

ANSWER: According to the dual-process approach, minorities and majorities exert influence in different ways. You should advise the council members to take advantage of factors that enhance minority influence rather than trying to manipulate factors that enhance majority influence. One such factor is style of behavior. The research of Moscovici and others has suggested that consistency is very important for a group minority. That is, the people in the minority should be forceful, persistent, and unwavering in support of their view, while appearing to be open-minded and flexible. Hollander recommends a different approach, however. Hollander argues that those in the minority should first conform to the majority opinions in order to establish themselves as competent insiders, and only then dissent from the majority. Thus, you should advise the council members that they initially show their support for the majority's opinion and then suggest their own opinion, and further, that they present their arguments for this latter position in a forceful, persistent, and unwavering style. In addition, the council members should also call for an anonymous, private vote on the issue, as minorities exert stronger influence on private measures of conformity than on public measures.

ANSWER: Lowballing is a two-step compliance technique in which the influencer secures agreement with a request but then increases the size of that request by revealing hidden costs. Disturbing as it may be, lowballing is an interesting technique. Surely, once the lowball offer has been thrown, many recipients suspect that they were misled. Yet they go along. Why? The reason appears to hinge on the psychology of commitment (Keesler, 1971). Once people make a particular decision, they justify it to themselves by thinking of all its positive aspects. As they get increasingly committed to a course of action, they grow more resistant to changing their mind, even if the initial reasons for the action have been changed or withdrawn entirely. In the car dealership scenario, you might very well have decided to purchase the car because of the price. But then you would have thought about its sleek appearance, the scent of the leather interior, the iPod dock, and the brand-new satellite radio. By the time you learned that the price would be more than you'd bargained for, it would be too late—you would already have been hooked. The door-in-the-face technique is a two-step compliance technique in which an influencer prefaces the real request with one that is so large that it is rejected. Why is the door-in-the-face technique such an effective trap? One possibility involves the principle of perceptual contrast: To the person exposed to a very large initial request, the second request "seems smaller." Two dollars' worth of candy bars is not bad compared with ten dollars for circus tickets. Likewise, taking a group of kids to the zoo seems trivial compared with two years of volunteer work. As intuitively sensible as this explanation seems, Coalmine and others (1975) concluded that perceptual contrast is only partly responsible for the effect. When participants only heard the large request without actually having to reject it, their rate of compliance with the second request (25%) was only slightly larger than the 17% rate of compliance exhibited by those who heard only the small request. A more compelling explanation for the effect involves the notion of reciprocal concessions. A close cousin of the reciprocity norm, this refers to the pressure to respond to changes in a bargaining position. When an individual backs down from a large request to a smaller one, we view that move as a concession that we should match by our own compliance. Thus, the door-in-the-face technique does not work if the second request is made by a different person (Coalmine et al., 1975). Nor does it work if the first request is so extreme that it comes across as an insincere "first offer" (Schwarzwald et al., 1979). On an emotional level, refusing to help on one request may also trigger feelings of guilt, which we can reduce by complying with the second, smaller request (O'Keefe & Figgie, 1997; Miller, 2002)

One variable in question was the proximity of the victim in relation to participants. The less physically separated they were, the less willing participants were to obey the experimenter and administer the maximum shock voltage. When the victim was in the same room as the participants, 40 percent of the participants fully obeyed, compared to 65 percent in the baseline condition where the victim was in an adjacent room. When participants were required to physically grasp the victim's hand and force it onto a metal shock plate, full obedience dropped to 30 percent. Physical separation from the victim allowed participants to distance themselves emotionally from the consequences of their actions, enabling them to obey the experimenter's orders. But the closer the victim was to the participants, the more difficult it was for them to achieve this emotional distance, and, therefore, the negative consequences of their actions were impossible to ignore. Social impact theory offers a related explanation, one that accounts for the effects of proximity in terms of the immediacy of the sources of influence. Just as the experimenter is a source of influence on the participants, so, too, is the victim a source of influence, albeit in an opposite manner. That is, the experimenter influences the participants to obey, and the victim, by protesting and crying out in pain, influences the participants to defy the experimenter's orders. The more distant the victim is from the participant, the less immediate is this source of influence, and, therefore, the less social impact it exerts.

Social impact theory maintains that social influence depends on the strength, immediacy, and number of source persons relative to target persons. Strength refers to the status, ability, or relationships of a source of influence compared to his/her target. Immediacy of a source refers to the source's proximity in time and space to the target. The number of sources refers to how many sources there are. The stronger the source (i.e., higher status or closer relationship), the more immediate the source (closer geographically), and the greater number of sources, the more influence the target will feel and the more likely that target is to yield to that influence. If the source's attempts at influence are divided among targets, that will dilute the impact of the source. This theory has been criticized for failing to explain why these factors affect social influence, but has the benefit of predicting when social influence will occur.

Sets found in the same folder

What is conformity when are people less likely to conform?

What makes people less likely to conform?

Which person is more likely to conform?

What does it mean to conform to the majority?