Blog Post #13

I think all three of the studies were very unique ways to show some basic ideas about social psychology. Some used simple experiments and others used some extreme experiments. I thought it was interesting how in the Asch’s conformity experiment the correct answer is so obvious but people don’t want to be different than the group. In Milgram’s Obedience experiment I found it hard to believe how many people were willing to hurt someone else just because they were told to do so. I never would have thought that the people in the Stanford Prison Experiment would have adapted to their roles the way they did. It’s actually somewhat sickening to me what people can become when put in certain situations. The studies show us that groups of people and the ideas they follow really have a big impact on a single person. If these people didn’t have the others around them or the set “norms or roles” around them they would be and act very different. This shows that Human nature doesn’t want us to be different than those around us.

Social influence refers to how people act when in the presence of other people. Most people are affected by the people around them in how they think and act. In many cases a person acted differently when in a group than if they would have been by themselves. There has been times where a group of my friends was talking badly about someone and I didn’t agree with what they were saying but I still went along with it and acting like I agreed with everything, sometimes even saying things myself so that I didn’t feel left out. There was also a time when I was in Spanish class. The teacher asked us all a question which, I thought the rest of the class was answering wrong but since they all said the same thing I didn’t want to be different and say the wrong thing so I just agreed with them. It turned out it was the wrong answer but I didn’t want to be the only person saying something different.

The most interesting thing I learned in this class was most of the things covered in chapter 9-Thinking and language. I think its amazing how our mind actually works to solve different types of problems, the confirmation bias, and other things like that. Its also interesting how much goes into actually speaking and how thinking and language work together.