Click on the following links. Please note these will open in a new window.

Video 1: Social Influence
Description: In this video, Professor Jack Dovidio from Yale University examines the process of social influence, with particular emphasis on fascinating non-conscious techniques that can be employed to influence others, and even oneself. Highlighted here are two areas: (1) How do we unknowingly influence others? and (2) How can leadership be influenced?

Video 2: The Psychology of Evil: Philip Zimbardo
Description: Philip Zimbardo knows how easy it is for nice people to turn bad. In this TED talk, he shares insights and graphic unseen photos from the Abu Ghraib trials. Then, he talks about the flip side: how easy it is to be a hero, and how we can rise to the challenge.

Video 3: Social Influence: Crash Course Psychology
Description: Why do people sometimes do bad things just because someone else told them to? What did Asch find in his famous Conformity study? What is normative social influence? In this episode of Crash Course Psychology, learn about key ideas and findings regarding Social Influence and how it can affect our decisions to act or to not act. Especially note the animations of the Milgram and Asch studies, they are well presented here.

Audio 1: Who’s Bad?
Description: Do violence and cruelty lurk inside us all? This question is explored by way of one of the most famous psychology experiments of all time: Stanley Milgram’s now-notorious experiment. But as made clear in this story from Radiolab, the experiment isn't just about obedience. If you look closely, a more complicated--and more unsettling--picture emerges, one that forces us to ask ourselves, “what is greater, and what is good?”

Audio 2: Contagious Laughter
Description: We travel across the ocean and back to the year 1962, to a girl's boarding school on the outskirts of a rural village in Tanganyika (now Tanzania), where, as described in our chapter, an epidemic of contagious laughter broke out. In this fascinating report from Radiolab, the search for an explanation brings us back to the idea that laughter is a social mechanism that responds to more than comedy . . . communicates more than mere merriment.

Audio 3: The New Norm
Description: Social norms determine much of your behavior--how you dress, talk, eat and even what you feel. In this report from Invisibilia, they examine two experiments that attempt to shift these norms: one regarding oil workers in the deep south who tried a social experiment to transform the entrenched macho culture of an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, and succeeded in changing the notion of what a Southern oil man is like, and the other a grand experiment in shifting a social norm, this time of an entire nation, when in the 1990’s McDonald's decided to open the first ever McDonald's in Moscow, but were impeded by the social norms around smiling and customer service in Russia (because in Russia smiling means you are an idiot!).