Compliance and obedience (influence)

Reasons why positive mood improves compliance:

• 1. Construal - feel happy and good, will assume others intentions are good
• Forgas & East, 2008: Watched happy, sad or neutral clip. After watched truthful or deceptive interviews of individuals who denied committing theft. Positive mood increased trust and decreases lie detection. Negative mood decreases trust and increases lie detection

2. Positive mood maintenance - saying no to a request is awkward and creates a negative effect. To stay feeling good, you have to comply.

• Isen & Levin, 1972: Participants given cookie (positive mood) or not (negative) and asked to serve as confederate for a quick experiment. 50% told role was to help, 50% told to harm. Results: Positive mood increased compliance for helping task only

3. Negative mood - increases compliance due to guilt (Harris et al, 1975): Asked catholics to donate money to March of Dimes. Condition 1: Asked while walking into confession. Condition 2: Asked whilst walking out of confession.. More donations before confession due to guilt

Emotion-based: Positive mood increases compliance. Isen et al, 1976: Called and said 'spent last dime on misdialled phone call.' Requested participants to dial intended number & relay message

Condition 1: Received call (control), condition 2: Receive small gift 20 mins prior call (positive mood induction). Percent who made call = 10%/100% because more motivated to help people in order to remain in a positive mood

• Norm-based: Descriptive norms - objective factual, description of what most people do. Descriptives work by informational influence (more likely to work than prescriptives).
• Prescriptive norms - What most people should do according to rules/traditions. Work by normative influence.

Reactance = When freedom is threatened, you experience negative arousal and try to re-assert your freedom by engaging in forbidden behaviour. React against complying as it is threatening. Fear appeals can backfire if too strong.

Goldstein et al, 2006: Small cards placed in bathroom of hotels to use towels. Normative info was manipulated. More compliance if more normative.

Milgram - obedience: shocs 15-450v. Do it due to power of the situation. 66% went to 450v.

• Manipulated: 1. Proximity to victim   2. Proximity to authority   3. Legitimacy of experiment   4. Location of experiment.
• Easier to disobey if: a. Victim closer (more salient), b. experimenter further (less salient)
• Why is this ideal for obedience? Released fro responsibility, step-by-step, lack of disobeying
• Proximity to victim: learner becomes salient, conformity decreases
• Proximity to experimenter: Authority less salient, conformity decreases

Cialdini et al, 2006: Signs in petrified forest national park to stop people from taking wood. Highlighting what people do wrong encourages others to do wrong. Theft 4x lower for right.

Schultz et al, 2007: Homeowners received messages about amount of electricity used previous week and neighbourhood average. Used more = started using less, used less = started using more