Social Impact Theory

obedience

What social impact is

The term social impact refers to effect that real or imagined people can have on our behaviour. ‘Social’ referring to the fact that the effect comes from other people. Bibb Lante 1981 developed social impact theory to describe how we behave within ‘social forcefeilds’ all impacting each other on each other through our ongoing interactions.

Sources and Targets

scources: people doing the influences

targets: are being influenced

math equation for sources and impacts

I=F(SIN)

• S= strength

• I=. immediacy

• N= number of sources

Strength, immediacy,number

strength= perceived power/authority of the source and the messaged they convey.

Immediacy= reflects the closeness of the source and the target in terms of space but also time. Physical or psychological barriers to communication will affect immediacy

Number=relates to how many sources are present during the interaction, which determine the level of social impact.

Multiplicative and divisional effects

Lantana used the phrase multiplicative effect to explain how increasing strength, immediacy and number of sources can significantly increase the social impact.

Obedience at the zoo

One strength of the social impact theory is that it is supported by research evidence. For example Constantine Sedikides and Jeffrey Jackson conducted a field experiment at a New York Zoo, where visitors were asked not to lean on a railing. The researchers manipulated the strength of the source by dressing a confederate either as a zoo keeper (58%) or in a t-shirt and shorts (35%). Obedience also declined when the visitors were further from the person making the request (61% when in the same room and 7% when not)- testing immediacy.

Competing argument

As this was a field experiment the researchers were not able to manipulate the number of people in each group, a threat to internal validity. For example people chose to go around in larger groups may have less obedient personalities (confounding variable). Meaning it may not be group size alone that determined the level of defiance observed.

Application to political influence

Social impact theory can easily be applied to understand how people enhance their social influence. For example political leaders may increase their influence by adopting a strong and persuasive style of communication to connect with their target voters aiming to reach voters by talking face-to-face rather than through TV or radio broadcasts and addressing smaller groups rather tan larger crowds, where the divisional effect may reduce the impact of their messages. This shows how psychological knowledge can be applied to society and how peoples behaviour could be influenced through a stragtegic campaign.

Conclusion

Social impact theory could be seen as reductionist. It reduces the complexity of human thoughts feelings and experiences to three numbers in order to predict outcomes. This is arguably is fruiyless task as quantifying ‘strength’, in particular, is very tricky because it is subjective to the individual sources and targets involved. This suggests that in order for social impact theory to make accurate predictions it may be necessary to gather qualitative