My Expeirences with the Foot-in-the-Door Phenomenon

* Our growing understanding of the belonging concept: The desire to be included is strong and the action of being excluded is humiliating:

Chapter 3 of Essential of Sociology: A Down-to-Earth Approach by James M. Henslin discusses the topic of socialization, which is the process by which people learn the characteristics of their group—the knowledge, attitudes, skills, norms, values, and actions thought appropriate for them. Sociologists try to determine how much of a person’s characteristics comes from “nature” (heredity) and how much from “nurture” (social environment). Studying feral, isolated, and institutionalized children, such as The Skeels/Dye Experiment, have helped them understand how “society makes us human.” The theories and research of Charles Horton Cooley, George Herbert Mead, and Piaget to explain socialization into the self and mind. Cooley’s looking-glass self theory focuses on how we believe others perceive us.

When someone is persuaded not on facts but on other cues, ex: attractiveness, sound of voice, persuader has special ‘powers’, etc.

Influence can cause some behavior in some person for a specific purpose based on a power base.

Fiske, S. T. (2010). Social Beings: Core Motives in Social Psychology 2nd Edition. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

This essay aims to explore and describe some of the key studies within Social Psychology and show why social psychology is still important within the science of psychology today. Social psychology was once described by Allport (as cited in Lindzey & Aronson, 1985, p.5) as, “the scientific study of how people’s thoughts, feelings and behaviours are influenced by the actual, imagined or implied presence of others”. One of the first psychologists to study social psychology was Kurt Lewin. Lewin is considered the “father of social psychology” by many as he took a stand against the dominant behaviourist approach during the 1920’s through his belief that interaction between the individual and their environment is key to affecting behaviour, rather than environment alone. His revolutionary ideas matured into the study of group dynamics, which is widely used by many organisations today (Collin, 2012).

My first test of my experiment was in a convenience store. I walked in; whispering hello and proceeded to grab a cup of coffee. In my whispering voice I asked a female employee about the coffee lids and interacted with the lady at the register. I observed that in both instances the females would lean

The contact hypothesis (Allport, 1954) is a technique that is used to produce a more broad-minded society. Work carried out on this field has shown that contact hypothesis has the potential to reduce on prejudice. According to Pettigrew and Tropp (2006) Contact is the solution to prejudice and it works best when it happens in common environment, where other issues have no influence. Two model that been influenced by the contact hypothesis are “the mutual differentiation model” and “the decategorisation model”

The interaction that I encountered happens ten years ago. When I moved to the United Stated, everything was still new to me. I had to adjust into many different things in the American's society in order to be at a social standard norm level here. In addition, my English was acceptable to get the message delivery to the other person. I clearly remembered one day as I was working out in a strange neighborhood that far away from my house, I started to get lost at a moment. I began to panic and could not figure out a way out to get to the main street. Therefore, my goal at that time was to get approach to one of the neighbor's house asking for a direction to get home. I want to interact with a complete stranger person and see how they would respond to help me. I chose this interaction because it gives chance to practice small talk with unacquainted person whenever there is an unexpected situation arises as well as to overcome the language barrier.

The theories I will focus on in this essay is Social Penetration Theory and Uncertainty Reduction Theory. The reason I choose both these theories focus on initial interactions with stingers and how relationships develop. The social penetration theory is an objective theory (A First Look at Communication, page 93) uses the example of peeling an onion. It shows the “multilayered structure of personality.” The theory explains that as you go from not knowing someone and over time developing a more personal relationship through stages of disclosure. The other theory I will highlight will be Uncertainty Reduction Theory which follows seven main assumptions on how we develop information about a new acquaintance in order to lower uncertainty and predict others behaviors. Overall I will outline the core beliefs of these two theories and tie them together as how they both help us develop relationships with new people. And explain how we interact in new social settings. Both these objective theories show similar links but in some ways are different.

walking to some random guy in a public bathroom. People will talk to you and not try to ignore you when you are not in a public bathroom. Having more people in the bathroom doesn’t make much of a difference, like I said before. The reason I think this is because they both gave me short answers. They didn’t ask me

After spending a good amount of the semester discussing and learning about Robert Cialdini, it is safe to say that no good discussion on influence and persuasion can go very far without talking about the man who wrote the book on influence. After learning about Cialdini, we now know what he identifies as the six weapons of influence. The six weapons are reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social proof, liking, authority and scarcity. By weapons, what Cialdini really relays, are the six behavioral triggers that tend to create habitual and expected compliance. To see if these influences really exist in the real world, we made trips to places where we were going to be potential customers, being sold a product or service by someone. We

Social interaction occurs between all individuals in society and can be studied through the use of the sociological imagination. A sociological imagination allows one to link their everyday activities and situations to society as a whole. I can study my own personal social interactions and the situations I encounter by applying concepts, theories, and perspectives that sociologists have developed for analyzing society and social situations. Although I encounter situations on a day-to-day basis, one notable example would be when I volunteered at the soup kitchen, where I had to control my emotions and play a specific role as part of my volunteer position.

“When an individual enters the presence of others, they commonly seek to acquire
information about him or to bring into play information about him already possessed. They
will be interested in his general socio-economic status, his conception of self, his attitude
towards them, his competence, his trustworthiness, etc. Although some of this information is
sought as an end in itself, there are usually quite practical reasons for acquiring it. Information
about the individual helps to define the situation, enabling others to know in advance what he
will expect of them and what they may expect of him. Informed in these ways, the others will
know

Additionally this cognitive processing may inhibit the ingratiation technique if the targets need for cognition (NFC) is high. Studies have shown that participants high in NFC were generally unaffected by the persuaders likeability. This is argued to be a consequence of their engagement with more extensive