Social Psych

Theme: political speech/beliefs

Compliance - going along with a request or demand; changes public behavior, but not internal beliefs--the lowest level of conformity    

    ex: People censor their own beliefs depending on the surrounding group's alignment.  In rural towns, liberal party members must suppress their personal beliefs to appear normal among the largely conservative population, despite not changing their own beliefs at all.  

Obedience - like compliance, obedience is going along with a request, but obedience requires a difference in power.  

    ex: At work, people are told to not divulge in political talk and they don't because they might be fired if they are not obedient to their boss's wishes.  In the 1920s, Ford began to pay his workers better but fired those who did not comply with his demands of supporting anti-Semitism, and thus any sympathizers would be forced to remain silent because the position of power forces them to suppress their own beliefs.  

Social Facilitation - people perform better due to increased levels of effort when in the presence of others, compared to when they are alone.  

    ex: Trying to impress others, people will research and put more effort into genuinely knowing topics that they must defend either around supporters of the same political party or against their opponent party members.  They gather better information for their preferred candidates and policies when they are forced to share them with others, ensuring that they are quality resources compared to the easy acceptance of information they gather for themselves.  This is evident in that most people who watch fallacious news channels like OAN will sometimes look for other sources, knowing that the news they choose to accept isn't reliable enough to share with others because they might be judged. 

Group Polarization - members of a group move toward a more extreme point in the direction that the group is already inclined towards.

    ex: At the January 6 Riot, Republican party members shared their views and felt comfortable becoming more radical, pushing their individual beliefs to the edge of reason and thus polarizing the entire group's views.

Reciprocity Norms - a social standard that people who help others will receive good things; also works the other way - bad 

    ex: When the AIDS epidemic first emerged in the United States, conservatives justified their lack of action by saying that the largely "immoral" homosexual victim population deserved the infection for their bad deeds, thus supporting this belief of reciprocity norms that bad things only happen to bad people.