Behaviour in the presence of other people, real or imagined.
13 topics · 25 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Opinions and Social Pressure
Solomon E. Asch · 1955
A third of participants agreed with an obviously wrong group judgement about line lengths at least once, showing conformity to a unanimous majority…
+4 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Attitudes and Cognitive Organization
Fritz Heider · 1946
People strive to keep their attitudes toward each other and toward third parties or objects in a balanced, consistent triangle, and will change one…
+13 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Communication and Persuasion: Psychological Studies of Opinion Change
Carl I. Hovland, Irving L. Janis & Harold H. Kelley · 1953
Reports the Yale programme's experiments on who says what to whom, arguing source credibility, message organisation and audience traits interact to…
+5 more at this level
12 of 25 works
Solomon E. Asch
A third of participants agreed with an obviously wrong group judgement about line lengths at least once, showing conformity to a unanimous majority even on a question with a plainly visible right answer.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyHenri Tajfel
Finds that dividing strangers into groups by a trivial, meaningless criterion is enough to make them favour their own group's members over the other's, locating the root of intergroup bias in mere categorisation itself.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyJerry M. Burger
A partial replication of Milgram's obedience procedure, modified to meet modern ethical limits, found rates of obedience to a similar breakpoint nearly as high as Milgram found in 1963, against the common assumption that people would refuse today.
Notes on this copyCharles Stangor, Rajiv Jhangiani & Hammond Tarry
An open introductory textbook surveying the field's core method - controlled experiment - and its central finding that situational forces shape behaviour more powerfully than most people expect or acknowledge.
Notes on this copyEddie Harmon-Jones & Judson Mills
Surveys how the original account of dissonance as any two inconsistent cognitions narrowed, after decades of revision, to cases where a person's own action threatens their sense of being a competent, moral, sensible self.
Notes on this copyFritz Heider
People strive to keep their attitudes toward each other and toward third parties or objects in a balanced, consistent triangle, and will change one attitude rather than tolerate the psychological strain of an unbalanced one - the seed of later attribution theory.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyLeon Festinger & James M. Carlsmith
Participants paid a trivial $1 to lie about a boring task came to believe the lie more than those paid $20, because a weak external justification forces the mind to supply an internal one.
Assumes enough statistics to read a mean and a t-test; the design is simple and the paper is short
8 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyAlbert Bandura, Dorothea Ross & Sheila A. Ross
Children who watched an adult hit an inflatable doll went on to imitate the specific aggressive acts they had seen, evidence that aggression can be learned by observation alone, without direct reinforcement.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyStanley Milgram
Ordinary volunteers, told by an authority figure to keep going, delivered what they believed were dangerous electric shocks to a protesting stranger far more often than anyone predicted beforehand.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyJohn M. Darley & Bibb Latane
People are less likely to help a stranger in trouble the more other bystanders are present, because responsibility to act is shared out among everyone present rather than falling on any one person - a lab-tested effect independent of the since-disputed newspaper account of Kitty Genovese's murder that first prompted it.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyDonald G. Dutton & Arthur P. Aron
Men approached on a frightening suspension bridge rated a female interviewer as more attractive than men approached on a stable bridge, evidence that arousal from an unrelated source can be misattributed as attraction.
David G. Myers & Helmut Lamm
Group discussion reliably pushes members' opinions toward a more extreme version of whatever they already leaned toward before talking, rather than toward the average or the moderate middle.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copy