SOCIAL INFLUENCE

 Why some people become leaders and other followers?

 Why a bully might be capable of disrupting a classroom full of adult
learners?

What is Social Influence?

 As a teenaged girl, you wouldn’t step out of your house in something that
went out of fashion two years ago.
 As a teenaged boy, you had to be part of the cool-dude group in your
college.

These or similar experiences happened because we were “socially influenced” – by

the group of girls in the college, by those cool dudes you were friends with.

Definition:

Social Influence can be defined as the influence that society (social groups, friends,
family, and others) exerts either deliberately or unintentionally, and which brings
about changes in someone’s behavior.

Social Influence – Factors / Forces:

Social Influence has many dimensions and it factors in different forces.

Some of these forces are:

 Charisma
 Authority
 Groupthink
 Expertise
 Emotions
 Trends

Do we change our behaviour as individuals when we come across such forces?

Charisma:
A charismatic person (the religious guru, the motivational speaker) might be able
to influence our thought process by saying those very things that we’ve been
hearing all our lives but never paid heed to.

Authority:

Similarly a person who has some kind of authority recognized by the society (a
policeman, a teacher, a doctor) can make us do things that we would probably
never do if we didn’t know of their authority.

Groupthink:

Members of group often begin to accept the majority view (despite their own views
being different) because they don’t want a conflict.

PLEASE REFLECT upon the other three factors – it isn’t difficult to see how
they influence the behavior of people, all the time.

Morton Deutsch and Harold Gerard described two psychological needs that lead
humans to conform to the expectations of others.

These include our need to be right (informational social influence), and our need
to be liked (normative social influence).

INFORMATIONAL INFLUENCE (OR SOCIAL PROOF) IS AN INFLUENCE

TO ACCEPT INFORMATION FROM ANOTHER AS EVIDENCE ABOUT
REALITY. NORMATIVE INFLUENCE IS AN INFLUENCE TO CONFORM
TO THE POSITIVE EXPECTATIONS OF OTHERS. NORMATIVE
INFLUENCE LEADS TO PUBLIC COMPLIANCE, WHEREAS
INFORMATIONAL INFLUENCE LEADS TO PRIVATE ACCEPTANCE.

Harvard psychologist, Herbert Kelman (1958) identified three broad varieties of

social influence.

1.Compliance is when people appear to agree with others, but actually keep
their dissenting opinions private.
2. Identification is when people are influenced by someone who is liked and
respected, such as a famous celebrity.
3. Internalization is when people accept a belief or behavior and agree both
publicly and privately.
Compliance
Compliance is the act of responding favorably to an explicit (clearly expressed) or
implicit (not directly expressed) request offered by others. Technically,
compliance is a change in behavior but not necessarily attitude- one can comply
due to mere obedience, or by otherwise opting to withhold one’s private thoughts
due to social pressures.

Identification

Identification is the changing of attitudes or behaviors due to the influence of

someone that is liked. Advertisements that rely upon celebrities to market their
products are taking advantage of this phenomenon. The desired relationship that
the identifier relates with the behavior or attitude change is the “reward”,

Internalization

Internalization is the process of acceptance of a set of norms established by people

or groups which are influential to the individual. The individual accepts the
influence because the content of the influence accepted is intrinsically rewarding.
It is congruent with the individual’s value system, “reward” of internalization is
“the content of the new behavior”

Social influence occurs when one's emotions, opinions, or behaviors are affected
by others.

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

1. Conformity

Definition

Conformity is one type of social influence. It occurs when we modify our behavior
in response to real or imagined pressure from others. Karl, the man cast into the
role of juror in a criminal trial, entered the jury deliberations convinced that the
defendant was guilty. Throughout the deliberations, Karl maintained his view
based on the information he had heard during the trial. However, in the end, Karl
changed his verdict. He did this because of the perceived pressure from the other
11 jurors, not because he was convinced by the evidence that the defendant was
innocent. Karl’s dilemma, pitting his own internal beliefs against the beliefs of
others, is a common occurrence in our lives. We often find ourselves in situations
where we must modify our behavior based on what others do or say.

Sources of the pressures that lead to conformity

The pressure can arise from two sources.

a). We may modify our behavior because we are convinced by information

provided by others, which is informational social influence.

b). We may modify our behavior because we perceive that a norm, an

unwritten social rule, must be followed. This is normative social influence. In the
latter case, information provided by others defines the norm we then follow.
Norms play a central role in our social lives.

Factors influencing conformity

 Conformity is more likely to occur when the task is ambiguous than if the
task is clear- cut.
 Conformity increases as the size of the majority increases up to a majority
size of three.
 After a majority size of three, conformity does not increase significantly
with the addition of more majority members.
 Finally, conformity levels go down if you have another person who stands
with you against the majority. This is the true partner effect.

2. COMPLIANCE

Compliance occurs when you modify your behavior in response to a direct

request from another person. In compliance situations, the person making the
request has no power to force you to do as he or she asks.

Compliance strategies
i. Foot-in-the-door technique (FITD): A social influence process in which a
small request is made before a larger request, resulting in more
compliance to the larger request than if the larger request were made
alone.
ii. Door-in-the-face technique (DITF): A social influence process in which a
large request is made before a smaller request, resulting in more
compliance to the smaller request than if the smaller request were made
alone.
iii. Low-balling: An initial offer is made that is too good to be true (e.g., low
price on a car). Later that offer is withdrawn and replaced with a higher
one. Person is likely to agree to the higher offer.

3. OBEDIENCE

Obedience occurs when we modify our behavior in response to a direct order

from someone in authority. Most of the obedience we observe daily is
constructive obedience because it fosters the operation and well-being of society.
Certainly no group, no society, could exist very long if it couldn’t make its
members obey laws, rules, and customs. Generally, obedience is not a bad thing.
Traffic flows much easier when there are motor vehicle laws, for example. But
when the rules and norms people are made to obey are negative, obedience is
one of the blights of society. This kind of obedience is called destructive
obedience. Destructive obedience occurs when a person obeys an authority
figure and behaves in ways that are counter to accepted standards of moral
behavior, ways that conflict with the demands of conscience. It is this latter form
of obedience that social psychologists have studied.

Destructive obedience result to roots of evil deeds. These are: 1. Instrumentality:

Using violence to achieve a goal or solve a conflict. 2. Threatened egotism:
Violence as a response to impugned honor or wounded pride. 3. Idealism: Evil
deeds performed to achieve some higher good. 4. Sadism: Enjoying harming
others (more likely to be reported by victims than perpetrators).

4. Peer Pressure
A person is convinced to do something (SUCH AS ILLEGAL DRUGS) which
they might not want to do, but which they perceive as "necessary" to keep a
positive relationship with other people, such as their friends. Conformity from peer
pressure generally results from identification within the group members, or from
compliance of some members to appease others.

5. Minority influence

Minority influence takes place when a majority is influenced to accept the beliefs
of behaviors of a minority. Minority influence can be affected by;

The sizes of majority and minority groups

The level of consistency of the minority group and

Situational factors (such as the affluence or social importance of the minority).

Minority influence most often operates through informational social influence (as
opposed to normative social influence) because the majority may be indifferent to
the liking of the minority.

6. Self-fulfilling prophecy

A self-fulfilling prophecy is a prediction that directly or indirectly causes itself to

become true, due to a positive feedback between belief and behavior. A prophecy
declared as truth (when it is actually false) may sufficiently influence people, either
through fear or logical confusion, so that their reactions ultimately fulfill the once-
false prophecy.

i. Obedience

Obedience is a form of social influence that derives from an authority figure,

humans behave surprisingly obedient in the presence of perceived legitimate
authority figures.

ii. Persuasion

Persuasion is the process of guiding oneself or another toward the adoption of

some attitude by some rational or symbolic means. Robert Cialdini defined six
“weapons of influence” that can contribute to an individual's propensity to be
influenced by a persuader. They include;
  Reciprocity: People tend to return a favor.
 Commitment and Consistency: People do not like to be self-contradictory.
Once they commit to an idea or behavior, they are averse to changing their
minds without good reason.
 Social Proof: People will be more open to things they see others doing.
 Authority: People will tend to obey authority figures.
 Liking: People are more easily swayed by people they like.
 Scarcity: A perceived limitation of resources will generate demand.

SOCIAL IMPACT THEORY (Read)

Social Impact Theory was developed by Bibb Latané in 1981. It states that there
are three factors which will increase people's likelihood to respond to social
influence

 Strength: The importance of the influencing group to the individual.

 Immediacy: Physical (and temporal) proximity of the influencing group to
the individual at the time of the influence attempt.
 Number: The number of people in the group.

Status

Those perceived as experts may exert social influence as a result of their perceived
expertise. This involves credibility, a tool of social influence from which one
draws upon the notion of trust. People believe an individual to be credible for a
variety of reasons, such as perceived experience, attractiveness, knowledge, etc.
Additionally, pressure to maintain one's reputation and not be viewed as fringe
may increase the tendency to agree with the group, known as groupthink.

Media

Those with access to the media may use this access in an attempt to influence the
public. For example, a politician may use speeches to persuade the public to
support issues that he or she does not have the power to impose on the public. This
is often referred to as using the "bully pulpit". Likewise, celebrities don't usually
possess any political power but are familiar to many of the world's citizens, and
therefore possess social status.

POWER
Power was found to be one of the most effective reasons as to why an individual
feels the need to follow through with what another says to them. If someone of
more authority or someone that is believed to be more powerful than the other is an
icon or most "popular" within a group, they have the most control over influencing
others. For example, in a child's school life, if there are those people who seem to
control the perception of the other students at school, then they are most powerful
in having a social influence over the other children.

Culture

Culture appears to play a role in willingness to conform to a group. People with

high conformity are likely to have a higher collectivist culture and thus a higher
propensity to conform.