Report on Social Influence: Conformity, Obedience, and Behavior

This report delves into the intricate realm of social influence, examining its profound impact on human behavior. It meticulously explores the concepts of conformity and obedience as key mechanisms through which individuals are shaped by their social environments. The report provides a comprehensive overview of conformity, dissecting its various types, including compliance, internalization, identification, and ingratiational, and the underlying motivations driving these behaviors. It further investigates the dual nature of conformity, differentiating between normative and informational influences. The analysis extends to obedience, contrasting it with conformity and highlighting its reliance on authority and potential ethical implications. The report draws upon research and real-world examples to illustrate how these social influences manifest in diverse settings, such as workplaces and social groups, and concludes by emphasizing the importance of understanding social dynamics in shaping individual actions and reactions.

Social influence conformity
obedience
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Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................3
MAIN BODY..................................................................................................................................3
CONCLUSION................................................................................................................................5
REFERENCES................................................................................................................................6
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INTRODUCTION
It is difficult to understand human psychology (Burger, 2018). This is because the human
behaviour keeps on changing. Human behaviour refers to way in which human being react or
acts with others. There are several factors which influence behaviour such as genetic, ethics,
values, culture etc. Basically, there are 4 types of behaviour that are pessimistic, optimistic, trust
and envious. Any change in behaviour also result in change in response and stimuli. Besides that,
there is high influence of society as well on behaviour.
In this report it will be described about conformity and obedience and different ways that
social influence effect behaviour.
MAIN BODY
Social behaviour refers to behaviour which is shown by two or more than two species of
same traits and characteristics. The human behaviour is highly complex as it is built by various
factors such as culture, attitude, values, etc. Thus, the behaviour is also influenced or get changes
to meet demand of social environment. The change in behaviour of individual is known as social
influence. It has been analysed that there are many ways through which social influence impact
on behaviour. There are many examples of it such as persuasion, social loafing, social
facilitation, etc. These all results in influencing behaviour. However, conformity and obedience
are also ways by which social influence occurs (Gibson. and Smart, 2017).
Conformity is a type of social influence which consists of change in behaviour to get fit into
a group. Here, the change may be either real or imagination (What is conformity, 2016). The
group pressure is of various types that are bullying, criticism, teasing, etc. generally, conformity
is also known as majority influence. There are many types of conformity which is defined as
below:
Compliance- It occur when individual is influenced when he or she want favourable reaction
from another group.
Internalization – In this person is influenced because induced behaviour is composed of idea that
benefit intrinsically.
Identification – In this person gets influenced as he or she want to maintain a good relationship
with others group.
Ingratiational- Here, a person wants to impress other group in order to gain acceptance from
them (King Jr, 2018).
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In this social influence occurs in two ways that is normative and informational. In
normative a person may want to fit into group. Also, there may occur pressure as person is
scared of rejected from group. It involves compliance as person publicly accept view of another
group. In this they go with crowd because they are concerned about what other thinks about
them. In this they do not want to get criticised. Hence, they want to get fit with them. Along with
that, in informational conformity person lack knowledge and aspects support. Thus, the person is
unclear as well about how to behave. So, in this case social influence occurs. It forces person to
accept view of another group. In this another reason due to which social influence occurs is that
people go along with source of info rather being finding out logic or reason behind it
(Panagopoulos, and van der Linden, 2016).
Obedience – It is form of social influence in which action is performed under order to an
authority. This is different from conformity as in this there is request done by another group or
person to perform action. Moreover, in this an order is accepted from high authority and
respected. But on contrary conformity relies on social power. Here, there is no pressure or force
applied by another group but only request is done. This changes behaviour of person to follow
commands or direction in order to perform action. Besides that, to follow order to authority
individual has to break moral duties and ethics as well. furthermore, in obedience there is need to
submit something to authority. Apart from that, it is carried out as per result of authority
instruction. However, psychological process of obedience is not clear in context of neuron basis.
In real world, obedience is highly followed by people. It is found that they follow instruction
given by superiors. This is done by their own willingness and people tend to choose things which
result in social influence (Roberts, 2018). For example – in office employees follow their
manager command. This leads to social influence as they have to work with same group. Also,
no ethics or values of individual led to influence as all others behaviour is same. Also, in many
situation obedience is good thing as it allows people to act according to what is said by others.
This is because in conformity there is pressure that is being made but in obedience request is
done.
It has been analysed that in both conformity and obedience independence and submission
is same. It is because social behaviour changes with change in thinking, feelings, etc. that is
either real or imaginary. ERP results suggest that obedience triggered bigger cognitive conflicts
than conformity. The social psychologists stated that everyone is influenced by people. This is
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because each one is unique and ultimately each of us makes choices about how to act and react
with each other. Thus, it is concluded that the way in which we act is clear reflection of people
with whom we meet (Xie, Chen and Anwar, 2016). It has been analysed that there are many
ways through which social influence impact on behaviour.
CONCLUSION
Hereby, it is summarised that behaviour is influenced by various factors such as genetic,
ethics, values, etc. There are 4 types of behaviour that are pessimistic, optimistic, trust and
envious. The change in behaviour of individual is known as social influence. There are different
ways which lead to social influence. Also, conformity is social influence which consists of
change in behaviour to get fit into a group. It is of 4 types that is compliance, internalization,
identification and ingratiational. In conformity social influence occurs in two ways that is
normative and informational. Obedience is social influence in which action is performed under
order to an authority. They both differ from each other.
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REFERENCES
Books and journals
Burger, J.M., 2018. Conformity and Obedience. General Psychology FA18, p.241.
Gibson, S. and Smart, C., 2017. Social influence. In The Palgrave handbook of critical social
psychology (pp. 291-318). Palgrave Macmillan, London.
King Jr, M.L., 2018 Conformity and Obedience. Social Psychology and World Peace: A Primer,
p.119.
Panagopoulos, C. and van der Linden, S., 2016. Conformity to implicit social pressure: the role
of political identity. Social influence, 11(3), pp.177-184.
Roberts, R., 2018. Social influence and malevolent authority: obedience revisited. Political
Psychology: A Social Psychological Approach, pp.271-291.
Xie, Y., Chen, M. and Anwar, C., 2016. Neural basis of two kinds of social influence: Obedience
and conformity. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 10, p.51.
Online
What is conformity, 2016. [online] Available through : <
https://www.simplypsychology.org/conformity.html#:~:text=Conformity%20is%20a
%20type%20of,norms%20%2F%20expectations)%20group%20pressure. >
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