ATTITUDE CHANGE, OBEDIENCE TO AUTHORITY AND ROLE CONFORMANCE

Choose ONE of the prompts below for your Forum topic (see the General Discussion Forum Instructions, and
the Discussion Forum Grading Rubric, for a complete understanding of what is expected and how your Forum
participation will be assessed).
ATTITUDES. Discuss how our attitudes are affected by the social psychological phenomena cognitive
dissonance, justification of effort, informational social influence, and normative social influence.
ALS CHALLENGE. Discuss the types of conformity and other social influences that were likely involved in the
viral success of the ALS ice bucket challenge. Be sure to describe the challenge, and define the types of
influence involved with specificity as to how and why the influences involved promoted the challenge success.
OBEDIENCE TO AUTHORITY. Discuss Stanley Milgram’s 1960’s series of studies on obedience to authority,
and the more recent study that uses a similar paradigm to study obedience (Burger, 2009). Be sure to discuss
what we learned from these studies (i.e., what can cause us to conform, or not), and ethical ramifications (pros
and cons) of such studies.
ROLE CONFORMANCE. Discuss Philip Zimbardo’s (Haney, Banks & Zimbardo, 1973) study on role
conformance (The Stanford Prison Experiment). Be sure to address what the Zimbardo team set out to
demonstrate with the experiment (i.e., what did he expect?), the results of the experiment and what was
learned, the potential benefits and pitfalls of role conformance in our everyday lives, and the ethical
ramifications of Zimbardo’s experiment.
SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION. Many scientists believe that we are each largely socially constructed through
conditioning (operant and classical), conformance, social tuning, normative social influence, and informational
social influence. Discuss how these social psychological phenomenon shape who we are.