• Social influence - the process through which the real or implied presence of others can directly or indirectly influence the thoughts, feelings, and behavior of an individual. • Conformity - changing one’s own behavior to match that of other people.
• Groupthink - kind of thinking that occurs when people place more importance on maintaining group cohesiveness than on assessing the facts of the problem with which the group is concerned.
• Consumer psychology – branch of psychology that studies the habits of consumers in the marketplace, including compliance. • Compliance - changing one’s behavior as a result of other people directing or asking for the change.
Four Ways to Gain Compliance
• Foot-in-the-door technique – asking for a small commitment and, after gaining compliance, asking for a bigger commitment. • Door-in-the-face technique – asking for a large commitment and being refused, and then asking for a smaller commitment.
– Norm of reciprocity - assumption that if someone does something for a person, that person should do something for the other in return. • Lowball technique – getting a commitment from a person and then raising the cost of that commitment.
• That’s-not-all technique - a sales technique in which the persuader makes an offer and then adds something extra to make the offer look better before the target person can make a decision.
Obedience
• Obedience - changing one’s behavior at the command of an authority figure.
• Milgram study – "teacher" administered what they thought were real shocks to a
"learner."
In Stanley Milgram’s classic study on obedience, the participants were presented with a control panel like this one.
Each participant (“teacher”) was instructed to give electric shocks to another