Social Psychology W5 P1

Introduction to Social Psychology, University of Queensland, EdX.

-To change someone’s attitude, and thus their behavior, we first have to give them a strong persuasive message associated with positive cues.
-For a message to be effective, people have to listen, understand, accept, remember, and then translate this idea into behavior.
-Compliance can be used to persuade without persuasiveness; this means agreeing to a request from someone who can’t make you carry out their request.

       Most strategies of compliance follow social rules:
-Reciprocation: This stems from the idea of doing something nice for someone after they do something nice for you. This idea has nothing to do with liking a person, it’s a social norm.
       Reciprocal Concessions: A person starts off with a huge request, and it is rejected. So they make a smaller request -the one they actually intended to make in the first place- and the other person feels pressure to accept that request to make up for denying their first request.

-Consistency: After commuting yourself to a thing or position, you are more willing to comply with requests tacked on after that are consistent with that position. We want to be consistent both inside and out. People even remain consistent if the reward for their task is taken away because they feel obligated to carry out the task now that they’re committed.

-Social Validation: People are put under pressure to copy the behavior of those around them. People have a constant need to evaluate themselves, and often do this my comparing themselves to others. An example of this idea is the Ice Bucket challenge.

-Scarcity: If there is less of a thing, people are more likely to think that the thing must be good; you’ve gotta have it. If there is less of it, that means that more people are taking it, which means it has to be a good thing.

Authority: We are more likely to follow the directions of those in uniforms. Even wearing a suit makes a person more persuasive. Plenty of advertisements do this by dressing their actors in lab coats or suits: it makes them more trustworthy.