Psych In Your World: Conformity and Social Norms
By Emily Stark
The “Psych In Your World” video series features short lectures by psychology professors at Minnesota State University, Mankato on a range of topics connected to psychology. These videos were created as resources for teachers of psychology at all levels. We also provide discussion questions for each video for you to use with your students.
Humans are social creatures, and the area of social psychology studies how other people can influence us, either directly or indirectly. In this video, social psychologist Dr. Emily Stark talks about conformity and social norms.
As you watch the video, think about the following questions:
What is an experience where you broke a social norm (intentionally or accidentally) or where you were in a situation where someone else broke a social norm? How did you feel?
Do you think resisting social influence would be easier or harder in real-life situations?
How could both normative and informational social influence affect mask-wearing?
How could researchers examine the impact of social norms on the behavior of mask-wearing?
Resources
Parham, S. & Hardy, M. (October 26, 2020). Face coverings, self-surveillance and social conformity in a time of COVID-19. The Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, https://www.cebm.net/2020/10/face-coverings-self-surveillance-and-social-conformity-in-a-time-of-covid-19/.
Wice, M., & Davidai, S. (2020). Benevolent conformity: The influence of perceived motives on judgments of conformity. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
https://www.spsp.org/news-center/blog/wice-davidai-conformity [This blog post summarizes the research in the Wice & Davidai 2020 study referenced above.]
The Social Psychology Network provides links to a number of resources related to social psychology, as well as current news stories related to social psychological topics.
This lesson plan contains more ideas for discussion questions and assignments to accompany the above video.