Social Influence and Attribution

Conformity and obedience

Asch showed people will give an obviously wrong answer to match a unanimous group. Conformity drops sharply if even one other person dissents.

Milgram showed that about two-thirds of ordinary people would deliver what they believed were dangerous shocks when instructed by an authority figure — while visibly distressed. Obedience is not agreement.

Zimbardo's prison study suggested roles powerfully shape behaviour, though the study is now heavily criticised on methodological and ethical grounds.

Attribution

The fundamental attribution error is over-explaining others' behaviour by disposition and under-weighting the situation. The self-serving bias is the mirror image for ourselves: successes are our doing, failures are circumstance.

Groups

• Social facilitation — presence of others improves performance on easy tasks, worsens it on hard ones.
• Social loafing — individuals exert less effort in a group.
• Groupthink — a cohesive group suppresses dissent to preserve harmony, producing bad decisions.
• Group polarisation — discussion pushes a group toward a more extreme version of its initial leaning.
• Bystander effect — the more witnesses, the less likely any one helps, through diffusion of responsibility.