sounds good to me (groupthink)

Every college student, and most everyone else has been in a situation where they were in a group working on a project and tried to make a decision. Unfortunately most of the time the group doesn't always make the best choice in this decision making endeavor. According to Ahlflinger and Esser (2001) this is likely do to groupthink, and is influenced by the leadership of the group. They found that groups with leaders that promoted thier own ideas where more likely to fall prey to groupthink than groups with leaders that did not promote thier own ideas. All to often I have fallen prey to the concept of groupthink while working on group projects in school, liekly do to the fact that when someone would take charge of the group and suggest ideas the confidence with which they suggested the ideas would make me, as well as the other members of the group feel that they knew the material well and could be trusted. Although they did sometimes in fact know the materinal at other times they did not, and we would suffer the consequences of falling prey to groupthink. The most entertaining instance of falling prey to group think however happened one afternoon when I was still in junior high. Me and a few of my friends had been building a small boat, and a great deal of decisions had to be made. the most important of which was adding boyancy. The leader of our ragtag group, my freinds older brother, had suggested that as long as we sealed the boat well that we would not need any added boyancy. Since he was the oldest, and had a fair understanding of the way boats worked we trusted him and finished the boat with no added boyant material, which would have been a layer of foam. After the boat was finished we took it to the creek near our houses and decided to test it. We pushed the boat into the creek and it was water tight, there were no leaks. Soon after my friend and his brother got into the boat, and just as I was about to the edge of the boat dropped under the water and both my friend and his brother were drenched from the knees down. So although I did not suffer the concequences for falling prey to group think I did witness them first hand and was spared only due to the fact that I had moved a little slower.


Ahflinger, N. R., Esser, J. K. (2001). Testing the groupthink model: Effects of promotional leadership and conformity predisposition. Social Behavior and Personality, 29, 31-42.

door in face=yummy yummy snacks

The video above demonstrates a concept of compliance known as the door-in-the-face technique. According to O'Keefe and Figge (1999) the reason that this technique works is because the individual that is having the request made to them feels guilty after they deny the initial request, which is an unreasonable request that the individual making does not intend to recieve, and so is therefore more likely to accept the second request, which is more resonable and what the individual making the request wanted all along, because it will make them feel less guilty about denying the first request. For this example the Individual making the request was hungry and wanted to get a snack from the snack machine, and knowing that the door-in-the-face technique could make the person he asked for money more likly to comply with the request for a dollar in order to get that snack if they were first presented with an unreasonable request such as borrowing ten dollars for lunch. In asking for the ten dollars first the individual making the request made the person recieving it feel guilty by making a request that he knew would get denied. Then when the individual making the request asked for the dollar which was what he wanted all along the individual who had denied the initial request tried to get rid of some of the guilt that he felt for denying the first request by accepting the second request and giving the other individual the dollar he asked for.

O'Keefe, D. J., Figgie, M. (1999). Guilt and expected guilt in the door-in-the-face technique. Communication Monographs, 65, 312-324.

Ha Ha...Sucker (low-balling)

Cialdini, Cacioppo, Bassett, and Miller (1978) found that an effective way to have a person agree to performing a behavior was to first have them agree to the same behavior without telling them the entire cost of that behavior, and only once they had agreed to the behavior with the lower cost do you tell them the entire cost. Although I have probably taken advantage of this technique for obtaining a desired object or behavior one example form my childhood sticks out most in my mind. When I was younger the place to go was the Sonic that was located on the other side of a subdivision that was between my house and the shopping center the Sonic was located in. I wanted to go there and waste some time because I was bored, but it was a few miles away and the only transportation I had was my bike. I knew that I would have to convince my parents to let me go. They usually would if I had a friend go with me, but on this particular day my friend that usually went with me was at soccer practice. I asked my parents to go telling them that I would go with my friend. When they agreed to let me go I left on my bike to go to my friend's house telling my parents that I was going to get him before I left. After a few minutes I returned home telling my parents that my friend was not home, but that I still wanted to go. Though at the time I did not have any idea of how important the time spent going to get my friend was, which gave my parents the time to think of why it was safe for me to go (e.g., I'd have a cell phone with me in case something happened, I was avoiding major roads and would be traveling on the sidewalks most of the way, and I had made the trip before), I know know that it my have been what made them make the decision they did after they had agreed to the first request to go with a friend. Although the friend was not able to go my parents still agreed to let me go, and according to Cialdini et al. (1978) it was likely due to the low-ball procedure and the effect that commiting to something as well as having time to think of other reasons why it was ok to go through with the behavior that was agreed to would increase the low-ball procedure's effectiveness on getting my parents to let me go to Sonic and hang out.


Cialdini, R. B., Cacioppo, J. T., Bassett, R., and Miller, J. A. (1978). Low-ball procedure for producing compliance: Comittment then cost. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36 (5), 463-476.

you can't make me (psychological reactance)

Brehm and Sensenig (1966) showed that if an individual were given two choices and there was another individual giving their opinion on the choice then the person making the choice will show a preference for the choice that the person giving their opinion prefers. However, if the other individual tries to tell the person making the choice what choice to make then the person making the choice will reject the choice that the other person is telling them to make. This is known as psychological reactance. In my childhood there was a choice that I had to make that some would consider to be rather important. I was raised Catholic by my parents, and when I was younger I would go to church with them without asking any questions because it was all that I knew. However, as I grew older I began to question why do I go to church every week. I personally felt that I was getting nothing out of it and saw no reason to continue going, but I did not want to make my parents think that I was not respectful of their choice, so instead of not going at all I began to question them about why I was supposed to be going. During this questioning my parents began to tell me that I had to go and that I did not have a choice about it. Needless to say I did not take to this very well, and in line with the findings of Brehm and Sensenig (1966) I reacted to this attempt to impede my freedom to choose by choosing the other option, which was to stop going to church.

Brehm, J. W., Sensenig, J., (1966). Social influence as a functionof attempted and implied usurpation of choice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 4(6), 703-707.

It's official: I don't really care. (Need to evaluate)

After reading about the Need to Evaluate study by Jarvis and Petty (1996) in the text I realized that it was likely that I was low in need to evaluate. I believed this because after reading the findings of the study I found that I was the opposite of the high need to evaluate participants who were likely to describe their daily experiences in judgmental terms, or to hold strong feelings about political or social issues. I myself do not get very judgmental about what happened during my day, and I do not hold strong political or social attitudes. I decided that instead of assuming that I would rate low in need to evaluate that I would use the scale that was used by Jarvis and Petty (1996) to assess peoples levels on need to evaluate. People who scored a 57 or higher on the scale were considered to be high in need to evaluate and people who scored a 46 or below were considered to be low in need to evaluate, and anyone who scored between these scores was considered to be neutral on need to evaluate. I scored a 31 on the scale which put me in the low need to evaluate group, and considering that I never feel a strong desire to voice a strong opinion on pretty much any topic, unless I think that arguing a point on it may be entertaining and cognitively challenging, I believe that this is a fitting evaluation of the way that I form attitudes about such topics.


Jarvis, W. B. G., & Petty, R. E. (1996). The need to evaluate. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70, 172-194.

Religion careers and gender (IAT)

The IAT is performed through word and image association. There are two headings at the top of the page that you associate a random word with. Each word goes with only one of the heading choices. This task is first completed for two separate sets of headings, and then the four headings are put together. For example GOOD and BAD may be one heading set and MALE and FEMALE may be another heading set.

I chose to do the IAT for the participant observer blog. I chose to do the religion and the gender-career IATs. The religion IAT was not exactly consistant with my conscious beliefs, as the IAT showed me as having a preference of Judaism over other religions, but I do not have a preference to any religion. The gender-career IAT showed me as associating males with careers and females with family, but I do not associate either male or females with only one of these aspects consciuosly. I feel that it is most likely that the reason for the results I obtained in both of the tests was due to the fact that I did not take the time to properly associate the appropriate letter on the keyboard with the headings to assign the words to. I believe that the IAT is showing cultural associations more than anything. I do not feel that the results of the IAT changed my feelings about prejudice and stereotypes. I don’t believe that it changed the way I feel about religion because I do not claim a religion and I feel that although all religions do have a few good ideas to them they are still just human constructs that are inherently flawed. I feel that the IAT did not change my feelings on the gender and its association with careers and family, because I know that it is common for women to be associated with family and men to be associated with work outside of the house. The test that I chose to retake was the gender-career IAT because the results were the opposite of my conscious beliefs. I took more time to remember the positioning of the titles at the top of the page that I was supposed to associate the words with befoe starting the association task, and managed to change my results to my conscious beliefs. All in all I do not think that the IAT is a valid measure of a persons beliefs.

look before you think (stereotypes)

Schmalz, Kerstetter, and anderson (2008) found that in the world of sports stereotypes can play a large role in the form of the stigma consciousness in the willingness of an individual to participate in sports. That is, they found that individuals would not participate in sports that held a negative stigma associated with it. I encountered a similar situation in my life with surfing. Although it was not enough to keep me from surfing it was enough to keep me from wanting to admit to being a surfer. For those of you who do not know surfers are generally stereotyped as being lazy potheads, which unfortunatley has been becoming more and more true. So when people would find out that I was a surfer it would change the way they looked at me, but eventually I learned that I should be proud to be a part of the ever groing world of surfing. Anyone who has ever tried surfing knows that it is not easy and that someone who is lazy would not stick with it for very long. Also, while there has been an increase in the number of "shady" people in the sport comparatively there are many more people in the sport doing great things. One example is the Malloy brothers, three brothers from California, who go to Ireland every year to surf, but when they are there they also run a surf camp that brings Protestant kids from the northern part of Ireland and Catholic kids from the southern part of Ireland, which is almost like two different countries and have them surf together. For those who do not know Protestants and Catholics in Ireland do not get along at all, and though these kids live in towns only about 15 miles apart they proably never see each other. After a do of surfing together however, these kids were laughing and playing together, and there was no separation between them. In closing, although there is currently a negative stereotype of surfers I am now proud to say that I am one and try to promote a more truthful image that represents all the good that can come from surfing, such as the Malloy brothers uniting children divided by religion in Ireland.

Schmalz, D. L., Kerstetter, D. L., Anderson, D. M. (2008). Stigma consciousness as a predictor of children's participation in recreational vs. competative sports. Journal of Sport Behavior, 31(3), p. 276-297.