Paper Assignment on Social Influence
             Humans are similar to animals that we have similar biological needs, but we have different behaviors from animals. According to Sigmund Freud, each person has different behaviors, which is due to the differences in traditions, cultures, educations and other experiences. Moreover, the environment and social norms directly affect the person's behavior. As a result, the person will have a tendency to behave in a socially acceptable way. Hence, we set up laws and regulations to maintain the social security successfully. In addition, some questions arise: Are people influenced by others? What types of people are easily influenced? Would a person be more influenced by an individual or many people? In our experiment, we focus on the influence of a group on an individual in order to test whether the social influence exists or not. I hypothesize that the more people who carry out a particular behavior, the more individuals are influenced. In other words, more confederates staring at the sky, more passersby will be influenced and look up at the sky especially if the number of people staring at the sky increases.
             From The psychology of social norm, the aim of the experiment is to test the differences in response of a person in individual and group conditions when he is facing an unstable situation with a lack of an external frame of reference. In a dark room, a tiny point of light would appear and move and then finally disappear. The subject estimated the distance of the light spot moved. The individual would build up a range of internal reference points. Therefore, the result between individuals had great variations. In the group situation, the individuals were influenced by one another, resulting that their norms tended to converge into a small range of variations.
             From Sherif's research, the results showed that group effect or social effect do influence the behavior of individuals who ten...