[music playing]

The reality in which we live is constructed by the culture in which we're raised. Social influence starts at the beginning, and it really never ends. So social influence is pervasive in the way we think about ourselves and the way we think about the world around us.

We spend a lot of time in life trying to get other people to do what we want them to do. Some excel at this. The great leaders of our time have seemed to know exactly what it takes to motivate those around them.

If you want to influence people, you have to first understand what they want. You have to understand their three basic motives.

There is the hedonic motive. Then there is normative influence, and informational influence. The first— and maybe most important— motive is the hedonic motive.

Hedonistic motives, or hedonism, has to do with motivations that come out of gratification, things that we enjoy— the sex, drugs, rock and roll kinds of motivations. And those certainly are shared with non-human animals.

Our desire for pleasure over pain is what allows us to learn. It's the engine of operant conditioning.

As deep as the desire to seek pleasure runs, so, too, does the desire to have others like us, to accept us, and to approve of us. We evolved in groups for a reason. We are wired to seek out the company of others to help us survive and reproduce.

There's two basic motives that make us responsive to other people. One we call normative influence. To get along, we go along. We want others' approval.

There are a whole list of norms, of unwritten rules of society that all of us follow with exceptional fidelity. And the reason we do it is we know other people won't approve of us if we don't.

One classic example of social influence was the conformity studies of Solomon Asch. He presented people with a standard line and asked them which of three comparison lines was identical to this. It was easy. Which one matched? 99% of the time people got it right.

But only one of the participants was a real test subject. What the test subject didn't know was that all of the other participants were confederates, or actors, working with the experimenter. Asch instructed the confederates to give incorrect answers to see how the test subject would behave.

He set up a situation where you would be giving your answer after other people gave their answer. And so what he found was, about a third of the time— a little bit over a third of the time— people would pick the wrong answer if other people picked the wrong answer.

And here's the final one.

C.

C.

C.

And that shows the power of conformity, that in this social context people would say things that didn't fit what their eyes were telling them.

That we call informational influence. Others give us information about reality. I was just in a group where everybody was looking left. I couldn't resist looking left because they might have some information that I need. And it would be stubborn insensitivity not to be open to other people's information. Normative influence and informational influence.

[knocking]

Hello.

Hi, Mrs. Ingram. I'm Andrew from Top Cut Kitchen Knives.

So when a salesperson says to us, most people buy the deluxe model, he or she is communicating to us that other people do this. And therefore, it's probably the wise thing to do.

Well, there are a number of common and very effective sales techniques that might be practiced against you if you find yourself in that situation. One of them psychologists talk about is the foot in the door technique. That is that you get people to agree to a very small request initially, and then you up the ante later. Another is known as the door in the face technique. That is you get somebody to slam the door in the face, and then you scale back the request. And you figure people are going to play ball. They're going to meet in the middle.

It's not comfortable to be the odd person in a group. And so we wear the clothes that other people wear. We adopt the mannerisms that other people adopt. We think like they think. We act like they act.

Sometimes cues for our behavior come not from the norms of our peers, but from the demands of authority. In a harrowing demonstration of the powers of obedience, psychologist Stanley Milgram devised an experiment in the 1960s that involved electric shocks and the limits of appropriateness.

In the case of Milgram, participant comes into the laboratory. There's another participant there, seemingly. But in fact, it is a confederate of the experimenter, another person who's in on the research. And there's a staged drawing in which it seems to the participant that it's random, but in fact, it's rigged.

And they were to give feedback on wrong answers by flicking electric shock switches ranging from 15 up to 450 volts, in 15 volt steps. So they asked a question, the guy got it right. And then he started missing answers occasionally. And after the third level, he groaned. And after the 10th level, he screamed in protest.

Answer is day. 285 volts.

[groaning]

Continue, please.

Fat, man, lady, tub, neck.

The question is, at what point will that teacher break off and say, I can't do this. This would be unethical. It would be unconscionable. And what Milgram found is even when you have that confederate banging on the wall and saying, stop. I demand— or banging on the table. I have a heart condition. Please, stop this. I refuse to continue, and so on, that oftentimes— and by often, we mean often more than half of the time— that teacher will continue, continue to the bitter end. Even up through 450 volts. Even up to xxx danger severe shock.

Now, what's the take home lesson from that? Is it that people will do anything terrible that they're asked? But he didn't set them down to give 330 volts and get a screaming response at first. Rather, he seduced people. He got them to commit a little behavior, and then just a little more, and then just a little more. And that's the step by step process by which were often drawn in to doing evil.

So why do people in groups sometimes behave badly, sometimes in ways that none of them would behave as individuals?

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The answer is that groups can make us feel deindividuated. They make us feel immersed in the group and they lead us to do things that we wouldn't normally otherwise do.

When people are in a state of being deindividuated, the norms that will typically restrain us from doing certain things are reduced. So what happens is people go wilding. They commit acts of vandalism, acts of violence. There can be a mob mentality. So it can be very, very dangerous to be deindividuated, lose your sense of self, of individual accountability, and then go on to perpetrate certain acts that social norms typically would restrain us from.

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