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  • Essay / Social psychology and the concept of social influence

    How do our daily interactions influence the decisions we make and, ultimately, individual behavior, feelings and thoughts? How does our society shape and construct our identity? All of these sample questions come to mind, leading us to think carefully about social psychology. The urgency of understanding how humans interact with each other in cooperation or conflict has become important despite innovation and advancements in technology. Social psychology provides insights that can change the world, just as we do. It's about how we discover who we are and how that relates to our relationships with others, families, colleagues and strangers. Social psychology studies how society, culture, and context shape our attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs. Social psychologist Kurt Lewin is known as "the father of social psychology." He is known for his field theory of behavior, as he was one of the first psychologists to develop many important ideas in this discipline, including an emphasis on dynamic interactions between people. Within the field of social psychology, broad and varied themes seem endless, including social cognition, social influence, group processes, prejudice and discrimination, interpersonal processes, and aggression. Social influence is an overarching topic that covers how humans intentionally and unintentionally feel and believe about others and situations. This takes on many aspects and can be factored into advertising, peer pressure, conformity, social facilitation and attraction. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an Original Essay There are many ways that people allow social influences to affect their beliefs, thoughts, and decisions; however, much of the persuasion we experience comes from external forces. Because social media platforms have the ability to use social influence to reach individuals, they are growing in popularity among businesses, television, print media, and the Internet; therefore, advertising as communication is an effective strategy for persuading consumers to purchase a company's products by attracting attention, influencing their choices and actions, and generating interest. There are many tools used in advertising, one of which is repetition, which is a powerful technique in visual and auditory advertising. Repeated use of statements and images keeps a brand or product at the forefront of people's minds, which can help them remember and even believe advertising messages as consumers accept that the opinion is more widespread. In visual advertising, we know that color has a huge psychological impact on audience behavior and decisions. Advertising designs should therefore be created with careful and intelligent use of color. Colors play an important role in attracting audience attention because they can be the main and only reason why someone buys a product. As an example of a specific and essential color choice, the color red is often used to trigger erotic feelings; it is associated with movement and passion. This creates a valid sense of urgency for promotions and sales. Advertising is responsible for creatingcognitive dissonance, because companies use it to their advantage as a method of persuasion. They persuade the consumer to purchase a product or service even if it is not in their best interest or could not benefit them. Cognitive dissonance was first studied by psychologist Leon Festinger. According to his theory, we have an internal drive to keep all our attitudes, behaviors and opinions in harmony, which goes against our positive perceptions of ourselves, so that we experience psychological discomfort. appear anywhere, anytime and in different formats. There is no doubt that advertising influences our culture, which in turn influences us. Every year, women spend billions of dollars in exchange for smooth skin, fancy lipsticks and shiny hair. In fact, much of our beauty culture has been largely shaped by modern advertising. Women around the world are convinced daily by beauty industry advertisers that they are not good enough and should use their products. Every time I see a beautiful, free and unprecedented female model in a cosmetic advertisement, endowed with elegant femininity and having a comfortable and pleasant time, I experience dissonance. I automatically want her to be in a desirable state with the product she's using even though I don't necessarily intend to buy it. The point of the advertisement is that as a woman, I could also be happy and beautiful if I use the same product that the model uses. Modern cosmetic advertising has changed our perceptions, attitudes and cultural values ​​towards beauty and how we view ourselves. Unfortunately, the majority of personal care brands exploit women's insecurities to increase sales and increase customers with an ever-increasing number of advertisements that constantly tell us how we should think and behave about our bodies. Here are different types of social influence: Conformity which is the changing of a person's behavior or beliefs in order to fit into a group, even if they do not agree with it. The most famous conformity experiment was that of Solomon Asch, in 1951. He performed what would become one of the defining experiments in social psychology to determine how social pressure from a majority group could affect thoughts , opinions and behaviors of a person so that they comply. . In his study, Asch used a laboratory experiment to study compliance where participants had to perform visual perception, the same as that performed by the Sheriff participants. The experiment established a comparison between a series of printed line segments of different lengths: a, b and c and the fourth line segment to which participants were asked to distinguish which line of a, b and c most resembled and corresponded to the fourth. double. Asch discovered that participants ignored their eyes and gave an incorrect answer by measuring the number of times each participant conformed to the majority opinion. The difference between Asch's line estimation experiment and Sheriff's light estimation is that in Sheriff's experiment there was no clear answer; however, in Asch's study, the correct answer was obvious because people were willing to reject reality in order to conform to the rest of the group. So why do people conform? And what are the factors that push a person to give in to group pressure? There are two main reasons for conforming: one is informational social influence and the other is informational social influencenormative social. Informational social influence depends on the attitudes of others to obtain information when a person does not know what response to give because he or she believes the group is fair and competent. However, normative social influence is simply the desire to fit in, feel good, be accepted, and belong to a group; therefore, this type of social influence operated in Asch's conformity experiment because participants did not depend on the group for information. This study highlights that the size of the majority is important for foreign normative influence, because the greater the number of people present, the more likely an individual is to comply. Fashion is a means that gets people to conform in order to fit in and win. acceptance by society which is often affected by normative social influence. It plays a major role in changing our attitudes, thoughts and behaviors. Fashion is one of the most valuable forms of self-expression we have as people because it is a medium that inspires and stimulates us to express ourselves and our creativity because we want to be different. It makes us feel good about ourselves. “When we look good, we feel good.” It is an art worn on a daily basis, it has an important part which can reflect our moods, our personality. However, this has negative impacts that can, for example, distract or distract people, especially young people, from other important activities and skills. In addition, from an economic or commercial point of view, fashion has a very positive role in society since it stimulates the economy by creating a customer base and a demand for products, because if consumers prefer a specific product, the price of this product will increase. we are social beings, so social interaction is so important in our daily life which puts more emphasis on the productivity and performance of the individual, and it is known as social facilitation. This can be defined as follows: in the presence of others, people perform better, regardless of the task they are performing. In 1898, Norman Triplett, in his experiment in social facilitation, used children and fishing reels. He asked his participants, the children, to spin the pinwheels as fast as they could. From this experiment, he discovered that many children spun the pinwheels much faster in the presence of the pairs than they did the task individually. So why and how do people perform better in the presence of others? A simple explanation is evaluation apprehension, which is the fear and anxiety of being judged by others, which can cause increased psychological arousal, such as adrenaline release and increased heart rate; as a result, it catalyzes the body to perform simple tasks or tasks we are competent at better and faster. There are two types of social facilitation: co-action effects and the audience effect. The co-action effect occurs when increased task performance is present when surrounded by other individuals progressing on the same task, and it was first seen by Triplett in his experiment on children and fishing reels. Whereas an audience effect occurs when an individual's behavior may change, because they think someone else sees it. I believe that the presence of others tends to improve our performance on many types, whether physical or cognitive, better than if we do it alone. I had an experience where I found myself giving in to..