• Social Influence: Refers to the ways that people are affected by the real and imagined pressures of others

  • Behavior can be constructive, destructive, or neutral

    • Constructive: Helping oneself or others

    • Destructive: Hurting oneself or others

  • Social influence varies as points along a continuum according to the degree of pressure exerted on the individual

    • Conformity

    • Compliance

    • Obedience

Social Influence as “Automatic”

Automatic Imitation

• Many nonhuman animals form and transit cultures using automatic imitation

• Babies imitate adults - imitation develops at different rates for different behaviors

Mimicry

• Chartrand and Bargh’s Chameleon Effect: When you’re in a conversation with someone, you’re subtly mirroring them

• Mimicry serves an important social function, as it enables people to interact more smoothly with one another

  • People like their conversation partner more when the partner mimics them

    • Also applies to AI/virtual reality

  • People mimic others more when they’re highly motivated to affiliate with them

  • When participants interact with others who exhibit negative, antisocial behaviors, mimicry backfires and causes the participants to be perceives unfavorable

• Nonsocial situations

  • The speaker’s tone in a tape recording affected the listener - ex of mood contagion

  • We mimic the language style that we hear in other people’s expressions and speech styles

• Mimicry is a dynamic process

Conformity

• Conformity: Tendency of people to change their perceptions, opinions, and behavior in ways that are consistent with group norms

• People find it difficult to breach social norms

• People won’t admit to being influenced

  • Try to reinterpret the task and rationalize their behavior as a way to see themselves as independent

  • Tend to judge themselves by focusing inward and introspecting about their thought processes, which blinds them to their own conformity

The Early Classics

• Muzafer Sherif: Participants converged on a common perception when brought into a group

• Solomon Asch: Confederates picked the wrong answer, leaving the participant caught between the need to be right and a desire to be liked

Why Do People Conform?

Need to be Right

• Informational Influence: People conform because they want to make good and accurate judgments of reality and assume that when others agree on something, they must be right

• Sherif’s autokinetic task

• Eyewitnesses trying to recall an event will alter their recollections / create false memories in response to what they hear other witnesses report

Fear of Ostracism

• Normative Influence: People conform because they fear the consequence of rejection that follows deviance

• People who stray from a group’s norm tend to be disliked, rejected, ridiculed, and dismissed

• People who are socially ostracized with various types of emotional distress

• Social Death: Our need to belong is so primitive that rejection can inflict a social pain that feels like physical pain

Distinguishing Types of Conformity

• In group settings, both informational and normative influences are at work

• Conforming judgments are caused when a group alters perceptions, not just behavior

• Private Conformity (true acceptance / conversion): The change of beliefs that occurs when a person privately accepts the position taken by others

• Public Conformity (compliance): A superficial change in overt behavior without a corresponding change of opinion that is produced by real or imagined group pressure

  • Pretending to agree when privately, they don’t

Majority Influence

Group Size

• Conformity increases with group size, but only up to a point

• After 3 or 4 confederates, the amount of additional influence exerted by the rest was negligible

  • Law of diminishing returns

• As more and more people express the same opinion, an individual is likely to suspect that they are acting in collusion or that they’re the ones who are conforming

Focus on Norms

• Most students overestimated how comfortable their peers were with the level of drinking on campus

  • The more normative students perceive peer usage to be, the more they consume

• Norms will only influence us when they’re brought to our awareness

  • The more litter there was, the more likely visitors were to toss their handbills to the ground

• Passersby were most influenced by the prior behavior of others when their attention was drawn to the existing norm

  • Ppl were most likely to litter more when the garage was cluttered and the confederate had littered

Presence of an Ally

• The presence of a single confederate who agreed with the participant reduced conformity by almost 80%

• It is substantially more difficult for people to stand alone than to be part of even a tiny majority

• Any dissent, whether it validates an individual’s opinion or not, is enough to reduce the normative pressures to conform

Gender Differences

• One’s familiarity with the issue at hand, not gender, is what affects conformity

• When participants think they’re being observed, women conform more and men conform less than they do in a more private situation

  • In front of others, people worry about how they come across and feel pressured to behave according to traditional gender-role constraints

Minority Influence

• People who assert their beliefs against the majority are generally seen as competent and honest, but they’re also disliked and roundly rejected

• Respondents who held minority opinions were slower to answer the question

• Minority Influence: The process by which dissenters produce change within a group

Moscovici’s Theory

• To exert influence, those in the minority must

  • Be forceful, persistent, and unwavering in support of their position

  • Appear flexible and open minded

• Unwavering repetition draws attention from those in the mainstream

• Consistency signals that the dissenter is unlikely to yield, which leads those in the majority to feel pressured to seek compromise

• When confronted with someone who has the self-confidence and dedication to take an unpopular stand without backing down, people assume that they have a point

• Dissenters have more influence when people identify with them

Edwin Hollander

• People should first conform in order to establish their credentials as competent insiders

• Idiosyncrasy Credits: Interpersonal “credits” that a person earns by following group norms

• A certain amount of their deviance will then be tolerated

Processes and Outcomes of Minority Influence

• Dual-Process Approach: Majorities and minorities exert influence in different ways and for different reason

  • Majorities: Elicit public conformity by bringing stressful normative pressures to bear on the individual

  • Minorities: Produce a deeper and more lasting form of private conformity by leading others to become curious and rethink their original positions

• The relative impact of majorities and minorities depends on whether the judgment that is being made is objective or subjective

  • Majorities have greater influence on factual questions

  • Minorities exert equal impact on opinion questions

  • People feel freer to stray from the mainstream on matters of opinion

• The relative effects of majority and minority points of view depend on how and when conformity is measured

  • Majorities have a decisive upper hand on direct or public measures of conformity

  • Minorities exert a strong impact

    • More indirect or private measures of conformity

    • Attitude issues that are related but not focal to the point of conflict

    • After the passage of time

Culture and Conformity

• The social norms that influence human conduct can vary in significant ways from one part of the world to another

• Individualism v Collectivism

  • Complexity: As ppl come to live in more complex industrialized societies, there are more groups to identify with, which leads to less loyalty to any one group and a greater focus on personal goals

  • Affluence: As people proper, they gain financial independence from others

  • Heterogeneity: Societies that are homogenous tend to be rigid and intolerant of those who veer from the norm

• Conformity rates are higher in cultures that are collectivistic

Compliance

• Compliance: Changes in behavior that are elicited by direct requests

• People often get others to comply with their requests by setting subtle psychological traps

Mindlessness and Compliance

• The mind is often on autopilot - we respond mindlessly to words without fully processing the info they’re supposed to convey

• Sometimes we process oral requests lazily, without critical thought

• Atypical pleas elicited more comments and questions from those who were targeted

The Norm of Reciprocity

• We treat others as they’ve treated us

• An eye for an eye / obligation to repay others for acts of kindness

• Can be used to exploit us

• People may feel compelled to reciprocate, but that feeling is relatively short-lived

• Reciprocation wariness

Setting Traps: Sequential Request Strategies

• Foot-in-the-door technique: Starting with a small request and working up to a big one

• Lowballing: Giving a deal and then lowering the deal (raising the price after someone already agreed)

• Door-in-the-face technique: Starting with a large request and transferring to a small one

• That’s-not-all technique: Door in the face, if they agree, keep going

Assertiveness: When People Say No

• Cialdini: Being able to resist compliance pressures rests on being vigilant

• Compliance only works smoothly if hidden from view

• Feeling manipulated leads us to react with anger, psychological reactance, and stubborn noncompliance, unless the request is a command and the requester is a figure of authority

Obedience

• Mere symbols of authority can sometimes turn ordinary people into docile servants

• Leonard Bickman: Uniforms signify the power of authority

Milgram’s Research: Forces of Destructive Obedience

• Some people, depending on the situation, are far more obedient than others

• Authoritarian personalities identified using the F-scale

  • People who get high scores on the F-scale are

    • Rigid, dogmatic, sexually repressed, ethnocentric, intolerant of dissent, and punitive

    • Submissive toward figures of authority

    • Aggressive toward subordinates

    • More willing to administer high-intensity shocks

Authority Figure

• The physical presence and apparent legitimacy of the man in the lab coat played major roles in drawing obedience

• When the experimenter was replaced by an ordinary person, there was a reduction in obedience

• When the experimenter was not watching, there was a reduction in obedience

• Destructive obedience requires the physical presence of a prestigious authority figure

Proximity of the Victim

• Because the participants were physically separated from the learner, they were able to distance themselves emotionally

• Participants obey less when they knew the learner

Experimental Procedure

• Participants were led to feel relieved of personal responsibility for the victim’s welfare

  • When they feel responsible, they obey less

• Use of gradual escalation in small increments

  • Foot-in-the-door technique

  • Obedience by momentum

• Participants found themselves in a new situation unlike one they’ve ever been in before

  • They didn’t know the norms, how others reacted, or how they were supposed to react

• Task was quickly paced

  • Gave participants no time to ponder and make careful decisions

Milgram in the Twenty-First Century

• Wim Meeus and Quinten Raaijmakers: Ordered participants to cause psychological harm

• Burger: Gave a partial replication of the Milgram experiment

• Obedience rate is not lower

Defiance: When People Rebel

• Social influence processes can breed rebellion and defiance

• Synchrony of behavior can have a unifying effect on people, increasing the tendency to follow what others are doing

• Acting in unison with others can increase our tendency to

  • Feel socially connected

  • Cooperate for the common good

  • Comply with a request to aggress against another person

• Presence of a group can help guard against destructive obedience, but is not a safeguard - groups can also trigger aggression

The Continuum of Social Influence

Social Impact Theory

• Bibb Latane

• Social forces act on individuals in the same way that physical forces act upon objects (ex: three lightbulbs will light up a room, any more won’t change that)

• Social influence of any kind - the total impact of others on a target person - is a function of the others’ strength, immediacy, and number

  • Strength: Determined by their status, ability, or relationship to a target

    • The stronger the source, the greater the influence

    • When ppl view the other members as competent, they’re more likely to conform in their judgments

    • Sources enhance compliance by making targets feel obligated to reciprocate a small favor

    • Authority figures elicit obedience by wearing uniforms / flaunting their prestigious affiliations

  • Immediacy: Source’s proximity in time and space to the target

    • The closer the source, the greater its impact

  • Number: As the number of sources increases, so does their influence (up to a point)

• People sometimes resist social pressure - more likely to occur when social impact is divided among many strong and distance targets

  • Conformity is reduced by the presence of an ally

  • Obedience rates drop when ppl are in the company of rebellious peers

• Pros and cons

  • Doesn’t enable us to explain the processes that give rise to social influence

  • Doesn’t tell us why

  • Enables us to predict the emergence of social influence

  • Allows us to determine when

  • Social impact is a fluid, dynamic, ever-changing process