Social Influence

Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View

Milgram’s Obedience to Authority reports on a series of experiments demonstrating that ordinary people will follow orders from an authority figure—even when those orders conflict with their personal conscience—revealing powerful influences of social context and authority structures on behavior. The work shows that obedience can occur across diverse individuals when situational pressures and legitimate authority cues are present.

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Politeness: Some Universals in Language Use

Brown and Levinson’s Politeness develops a model of face‑saving communication that explains how speakers across cultures use linguistic strategies to mitigate social conflict and maintain mutual respect. Central to the theory is the idea that all individuals have a desire to protect both their own and others’ “face,” leading to varied politeness strategies depending on social context and power relations.

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The Bases of Social Power

French and Raven’s model identifies five (later expanded to six) fundamental bases of social power that explain how individuals influence others: reward, coercive, legitimate, referent, expert, and informational power. These power bases describe different sources of influence ranging from formal authority to personal persuasion and expertise.

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Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

In Influence, Robert Cialdini outlines the key psychological principles that drive people to say “yes,” explaining how factors like reciprocity, commitment, social proof, authority, liking, scarcity, and unity influence persuasion and decision‑making. The expanded edition updates the original work with new research and real‑world examples showing how these persuasion principles operate in contemporary contexts.

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The Psychology of the Internet

Patricia Wallace’s The Psychology of the Internet provides a comprehensive research‑based overview of how online environments shape human behavior, emotions, and social interaction across contexts such as impression formation, group dynamics, aggression, attraction, altruism, privacy, gaming, development, and gender. The book integrates classic and contemporary psychological research to explain why people behave differently online and how those behaviors both reflect and inform social life on the Internet.

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The Law of Group Polarization

Sunstein explores how deliberation among like-minded individuals tends to amplify their preexisting views, a phenomenon he terms group polarization. He proposes that this effect is not just a quirk of psychology but a reliable pattern with implications for law, politics, and public discourse.

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