Influence other OR to be influence..

Social psychology --- The scientific study of how a person’s thoughts, feelings, and behavior are   

                                    influenced by the real, imagined, or implied presence of others

 Social psychology emphasizes the influence of situations on behavior. People often find it difficult to see the role that powerful situations play in producing their own and others' behavior, and they are inclined to overemphasize the importance of personal dispositions in producing behavior.

Sociology --- the study of people and how they interact with society.

Social influence--- The process through which the real or implied presence of others can directly or                        indirectly influence the thoughts, feelings, and behavior of an individual. 

Social influence takes many forms and can be seen in conformity, socialization, peer pressure, obedience, leadership, persuasion, sales and marketing.

Conformity - changing one’s own behavior to match that of other people.

Solomon Eliot Asch was an American Gestalt psychologist and pioneer in social psychology. He created seminal pieces of work in impression formation, prestige suggestion, conformity, and many other topics in social psychology.

Solomon Asch conducted an experiment to investigate the extent to which social pressure from a majority group could affect a person to conform.

Results:

 Asch measured the number of times each participant conformed to the majority view.  On average, about one third (32%) of the participants who were placed in this situation went along and conformed with the clearly incorrect majority on the critical trials.

Over the 12 critical trials about 75% of participants conformed at least once and 25% of participant never conformed. In the control group, with no pressure to conform to confederates, less than 1% of participants gave the wrong answer.

Why did the participants conform so readily? 

When they were interviewed after the experiment, most of them said that they did not really believe their conforming answers, but had gone along with the group for fear of being ridiculed or thought "peculiar".  A few of them said that they really did believe the group's answers were correct.

 Apparently, people conform for two main reasons: because they want to fit in with the group (normative influence) and because they believe the group is better informed than they are (informational influence