Thoughts, emotions and behaviour of people become more similar if they interact with each other. A social norm is a generally accepted way of thinking, feeling or behaving that most people in a group agree on. There are two types of social norms. Descriptive social norms are norms that serve the connectedness motive and refers to what people feel, think and do. Injunctive social norms serve the mastery motive and refer to what people should feel, think and do. Group conformity occurs if there is an ambiguous stimulus, but also if there is an objective stimulus (e.g: Asch’s experiment). Conformity refers to the convergence of individual’s thoughts, feelings, or behaviour toward a social norm. There are two types of conformity. Private conformity occurs when people are truly persuaded that the group is right and willingly and privately accept group norms as their own beliefs. Public conformity occurs when people respond to real or imagined pressure and behave consistently with the norms that they do not privately accept as correct. People publicly conform because they fear ridicule and rejection. Social influence impacts early unconscious visual perceptual processing and thus changes what an individual sees. People conform because they expect everyone to see the world the same way and they expect to see the world the same way as others do. The false consensus effect is the tendency to overestimate other’s agreement with one’s own opinions, characteristics and behaviour. The more important the connection to others, the stronger the false consensus effect. Norms fulfil mastery motives. Norms help us understand the world and predict it better. Consensus tells us something about reality. Descriptive norms are powerful guides to reality. Norms have an informational influence. This is the process by which group norms are privately accepted to achieve or maintain mastery of reality. The amount of influence the group exerted increased as the size of...

Aggression is the delivery of an aversive stimulus from one person to another with an expectation of causing such harm when the other person is motivated to escape or avoid the stimulus. Conflict refers to a perceived incompatibility of goals between two or more parties. There are two types of aggression. Instrumental aggression (cold) refers to aggression serving mastery needs and aggression used to achieve goals. Hostile aggression (warm) refers to aggression that is driven by emotion.Lorenz states that it’s human nature to be aggressive and aggression is inevitable. Aggression is one means of asserting dominance and is not necessary. Aggression can be measured by the hot sauce paradigm. Research in aggression has to be confirmed both in the lab and outside of the lab. Construct validity is very important. Aggression is usually triggered by perceptions and interpretations of the situation.People who believe that aggression leads to rewards are more aggressive. People tend to make a cost-benefit equation of aggression. Interpersonal aggression frequently occurs in response to threats to self-esteem or connectedness. Reminders of one’s mortality makes a person more aggressive. There are also individual differences in the interpretation of situations and the way to act on aggressiveness. The frustration-aggression theory states that any frustration inevitably triggers aggression. Frustration is any act (of another person) that blocks an important goal. Berkowitz states that aggression doesn’t occur because of frustration, but because of the negative feelings that result. Not all negative emotions result in aggression, disgust does not.Exposure to aggressive models makes violent behaviour seem more appropriate because it stimulates aggressive thoughts and feelings. Some cues make aggression more intense and more likely, such as seeing a weapon. When people are thinking superficially, angry feelings and negative thoughts are likely to lead to...