Social Psychology: Why Do Humans Behave The Way They Do?

The way a human being develops throughout their lifespan and the way they behave socially can give extreme insight to the question of “why do humans behave the way they do?” Many people look for the feeling of being accepted by others so many will stay in the social norm range to not look like an outsider. But this isn’t anything out of the ordinary; it comes natural to human beings to behave this way. The study of Social psychology will aid us in comprehending why we as humans are socially influenced. A couple elements of social influence and social perception goes hand in hand when it comes to understanding the human development process.

It is natural for humans to be socially influenced in their adolescence stage of growth. a type of social

Social compensation occurs within a person when that person works exceptionally harder in order to compensate for a group members lack of effort. Kipling William and Steven Karau were the first to document the social compensation hypothesis. In one of their experiments participants were willing to compensate for a slacking coworker to avoid a negative group product due to perceived personal significance. According to Williams and Karau’s research, “individual will feel compelled to contribute more to the collective goal to compensate for the inadequate contributions of their co-workers. The perception of adequate co-workers contributions may be derived from a general lack of trust in the reliability of others to perform well…” (p.

Penner (1978) proposed that “conformity is a change in behavior or belief as the result of real or imagined social pressure” (p. 242). Having the pressures of conforming to social norms, societal standards of acceptable behavior, may create a change in public behavior but it will not produce a change in ones’ personal belief. For example, in Solomon Asch’s experiment, he showed a group of men a 3 different line sizes with one being obviously longer than the other. When asked with line was bigger, the controlled group of participants were told to lie and say the short line was the longest when it clearly was not, and when it came time for the experimental group to state their opinion, they agreed with the rest of the group even thought the look on their faces were unsettled with giving the wrong