Anti-vulnerability trainings such as these can be helpful. Ultimately, however, the most effective defense against unwanted persuasion is to accept just how vulnerable we are.

hey want the door to be slammed in their face. Looking forlorn, they now follow this with a smaller request, which, unknown to the customer, was their target all along.

Westerners have a desire to both feel and be perceived to act consistently.

If everyone is doing it, it must be right.

if a colleague helps you when you’re busy with a project, you might feel obliged to support her ideas for improving team processes. Y

Surveys show we turn to people around us for many decisions.

Children who watched the celebrity endorser not only preferred the toy cars more but were convinced the endorser was an expert about the toys.

Ultimately, it is because we like them. More than any single quality, we trust people we like.

We assume their positions give them special access to information and power. Usually we are correct, so that our willingness to defer to authorities becomes a convenient shortcut to sound decision making.

From earliest childhood, we learn to rely on authority figures for sound decision making because their authority signifies status and power, as well as expertise.

It seems that the phrase "a good cause" triggered a willingness to act. In fact, when the phrase "a good cause" was paired with a locally-recognized charity (known for its food-for-the-homeless program) the numbers held steady at 14 out of 30.

We also operate in a reflexive, non-thinking way when we make many decisions.

The peripheral route, on the other hand, relies on superficial cues that have little to do with logic.

he central route is intended to produce enduring agreement

When persuasion is well-meaning, we might call it education. When it is manipulative, it might be called mind control

As the world becomes more interconnected—more collaborations between countries, more intermarrying between different groups—more and more people are encountering greater diversity of others in everyday life

And this life-changing decision stems from the simple, natural human tendency to be more comfortable with people like yourself. 

iking yourself and your groups is human nature. The larger issue, however, is that own-group preference often results in liking other groups less.

real in their consequences. They are automatic, ambiguous, and ambivalent, but nonetheless biased, unfair, and disrespectful to the belief in equality.

hus, those high in SDO see groups as battling each other for these resources, with winners at the top of the social hierarchy and losers at the bottom

choose and thrive in occupations that maintain existing group hierarchies (police, prosecutors, business), compared to those lower in SDO, who tend to pick more equalizing occupations (

group hierarchies are inevitable in all societies and are even a good idea to maintain order and stability

Blatant biases are conscious beliefs, feelings, and behavior that people are perfectly willing to admit,

But still, people put other people into groups, using that label to inform their evaluation of the person as a whole

Another point of controversy concerns the ethical treatment of research participants.

Virtually everyone says he or she would have stopped early in the process. And most people predict that very few if any participants would keep pressing all the way to 450 volts. Yet in the basic procedure described here, 65 percent of the participants continued to administer shocks to the very end of the session.

f “following orders” or “just doing my job,” p

which means we sometimes rely on a flawed notion of the norm

more conformity is found in collectivist countries such as Japan and China than in individualistic countries such as the United States

increase in conformity with more confederates (up to about five), that teenagers are more prone to conforming than are adults,

The first of these is normative influence. When normative influence is operating, people go along with the crowd because they are concerned about what others think of them.

humans may possess an inherent tendency to imitate the actions of others.

ut our views on political issues, religious questions, and lifestyles a

he found so normal at the time.

The findings raise questions about the power of blind obedience in deplorable situations such as atrocities and genocide.

Obeying orders from an authority figure can sometimes lead to disturbing behavior.

have information we do not, and relying on norms can be a reasonable strategy when we are uncertain about how we are supposed to act.

People who participate in psychological studies should be exposed to risk only if they fully understand the risks

would be considered unethical by today’s standards

Imagine, for example, encouraging people to deliver what they believe to be a dangerous electric shock to a stranger (with bloodcurdling screams for added effect!). This is considered a “classic” study in social psychology.

Furthermore, considering that 96% of participants in psychology studies come from western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic countries

have been guilty of largely recruiting samples of convenience from the thin slice of humanity—students—found at universities and colleges

ategories while their reaction time is measured (in milliseconds). For example, an IAT might begin with participants sorting the names of relatives (such as “Niece” or “Grandfather”) into the categories “Male” and “Female,”

lmost 100% of those who found a dime helped to pick up the papers. And what about those who didn’t find a dime? Only 1 out 25 of them bothered to help.

Second, upon returning to the lab, participants in all three conditions were told they would later undergo electric shocks

as “social facilitation,” is reliable—performance on simple or well-rehearsed tasks tends to be enhanced when we are in the presence of others (even when we are not competing against them).

riding in competitive races appeared to improve riders’ times by about 20-30 seconds every mile compared to when they rode the same courses alone. Triplett suspected that the riders’ enha

our decisions are influenced by our experiences, expectations, emotions, motivations, and current contexts.

fear that expressing their true attitudes will be viewed as socially unacceptable.

individuals aren’t always aware of their true attitudes,

When concepts and behaviors have been repeatedly associated with each other, one of them can be primed

Do we actively choose and control all our behaviors or do some of these behaviors occur automatically?

The durability bias refers to the tendency for people to overestimate how long (or, the duration) positive and negative events will affect them.

Although you’re probably right that you will feel negative (and not positive) emotions, will you be able to accurately estimate how negative you’ll feel? What about how long those negative feelings will last?

Therefore, although the man fits the mental image of a professor, the actual probability of him being one (considering the number of professors out there) is lower than that of being a truck driver.

A script for dining

n this way, our schemas greatly reduce the amount of cognitive work we need to do and allow us to “go beyond the information given” (

but many of our decisions and behaviors are driven by unconscious processes and implicit attitudes we are unaware of having.

cognitive skills

In autobiographical reasoning, a narrator is able to derive substantive conclusions about the self from analyzing his or her own personal experiences. Adolescents may develop the ability to string together events into causal chains and inductively derive general themes about life from a sequence of chapters and scenes

n this rich passage, Erikson intimates that the development of a mature identity in young adulthood involves the I’s ability to construct a retrospective and prospective story about the Me (

heir relative success in achieving their most cherished goals, furthermore, goes a long way in determining children’s self-esteem

. By age 1 year, moreover, infants show a strong preference for observing and imitating the goal-directed, intentional behavior of others, rather than random behaviors

the inner needs, wants, desires, goals, values, plans, programs, fears, and aversions that seem to give behavior its direction and purpose (

Research suggests that broad traits tend to be stubborn, resistant to change

he may say that she is “nice,” or “helpful,” or that she is “a good girl most of the time.” By the time, she hits fifth grade (age 10), Jessica sees herself in more complex ways, attributing traits to the self such as “honest,” “moody,” “outgoing,” “shy,” “hard-working,” “smart,” “good at math but not gym class,” or “nice except when I am around my annoying brother.” By late childhood and early adolescence, the personality traits that people attribute to themselves, as well as those

Erikson (1963) argued that experiences of trust and interpersonal attachment in the first year of life help to consolidate the autonomy of the ego in the second

or example, Freud (1923/1961) and his followers in the psychoanalytic tradition traced the emergence of an autonomous ego back to the second year.

human evolution, scientists have portrayed human nature as profoundly social

thinking about your whole life story in a completely different way,

How does a person know who he or she is?

First, the self may be seen as a social actor, who enacts roles and displays traits by performing behaviors in the presence of others