PSY 2110 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Social Influence, Stanford Prison Experiment, Social Inhibition

• School: University of Ottawa
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSY 2110
• Professor: Daniel Bentley

Document Summary

Social influence: change of attitudes, beliefs, opinions, values, or behaviour, as a result of being exposed to those of others. Social facilitation: improvement in the performance of well learned/easy tasks. Social inhibition: worsening of performance of poorly learned/difficult. Take precedence in an individual"s behaviour repertoire. Have a higher likelihood of elicitation than other responses (dominant responses) Mere presence tasks due to the presence of others: facilitates responses that , inhibits responses that . That an individual has never or only infrequently performed. Concerns about others" appraisal: causes arousal leading to social facilitation, people have learned to be apprehensive about being evaluated. Task difficulty less important that subjective expectation: i. e. that one will perform well (or poorly) and that one will receive positive (or negative) outcomes. This is found all the way up and down the continuum (cockroaches, ants, and chickens all show social facilitation/inhibition effects) There is some experimental support for cottrell"s explanation.