Social Influence - Majority Influence Flashcards
What do we mean by social influence?:
- Other people make deliberate attempts to persuade us
- But we are susceptible to social influence even when others are not necessarily trying to influence us.
Social influence definitions:
- Majority influence (conformity) - “Social influence resulting from exposure to the opinions of a majority or the majority of one’s group” (Hewstone, Stroebe & Jonas, 2015, p. 247)
- Minority influence (innovation) - “Situation in which either an individual or a group in a numerical minority can influence the majority” (Hewstone, Stroebe & Jonas, 2015, p. 247)
Classical studies on majority influence:
- Sherif’s autokinetic effect
- Asch: classical paradigm and findings
Solomon Asch:
· The “Asch” experiments
- Often referred to as his studies of “conformity”
Muzafer Sherif:
· Asch’s work central and influential
· Asch’s work stimulated by the work of Sherif on social norm formation and transmission
Social norms:
· Social norms are “belief systems about how (not) to behave, that guide behaviour, but without the force of laws, and reflect group members’ shared expectations about typical or desirable activities” (Hewstone, Stroebe & Jonas, 2015, p. 238)
Muzafer Sherif (1936):
· Used autokinetic effect (ambiguous stimuli) and asked groups of male participants to determine how much the point of light had moved
· The point of light never moved
Sherif (1936): influence of others on our behaviour when faced with ambiguous stimuli.
Asch:
· Asch (1951, 1955, 1956): influence of others on our behaviour when faced with unambiguous stimuli.
Asch paradigm:
· Series of experiments
· Basic experiment
· 18 trials
· Differing number of confederates (e.g., 9)
· Naïve participant last but one to call out
· Correct responses on 6/18 trials (1/3rd of trials)
· Confederates made errors on 12/18 trials (2/3rds of trials), starting trial 3
· Unanimous majority
Basic findings (Asch 1951; 1956):
· CONFORMITY
- 37% of responses were incorrect.
- 75% of participants made at least one error (compared to almost 0% when doing task alone).
- 5% of participants yielded all the time
· INDEPENDENCE
- 63% of responses were correct.
- 95% of participants gave correct responses at least once.
- 25% of participants never yielded.
- 65% of participants gave correct answers most or all of the time.
Asch’s take on his results:
· “Despite this large effect, the preponderance of judgments was independent, evidence that under the present conditions the force of the perceived data far exceeded that of the majority. (Asch, 1956, p. 10).”
When do we conform?:
· Group size
· Unanimity
· Culture
When do we conform? - group size:
- Inconsistent: leveling off (e.g. majority of 3 in Asch, 1951) vs linear increase (Gerard et al., 1968) (see meta-analysis by Bond, 2005, suggesting inconclusive findings!)
When do we conform? - unanimity:
- Variation where confederate gives a deviate but wrong answer decreases conformity. Dissent in Asch’s paradigm, regardless of accuracy, decreases conformity
When do we conform? - culture:
- Effect replicated across various cultures but conformity degrees vary
- Collectivistic cultures show greater conformity
How do we conform?:
· Stated reasons for independence and yielding based on post-experimental interviews
How do we conform 2:
· Independent participants:
- Confident (the others are wrong)
- Tension and doubt (feeling of discomfort and feeling incorrect but obligation to respond truthfully)
· From Asch (1956):
- “Only rarely did we find an independent subject completely free of doubt.”
How do we conform 3:
· Yielding participants:
- Distortion of perception
- Distortion of judgment
- Distortion of action
· Participants in reality fell into more than one group (contradictory motives)
Distortion of perception:
· Yielding without awareness
· Rare
Distortion of judgement:
· One participant:
- In those four to six cases I agreed because I figured they were right. […] I only assumed my answers to be wrong, because I disagreed with everyone else”.
Distortion of action:
· One participant:
- “I might be alienating a few people. Here was a group; they had a definite idea; my idea disagreed; this might arouse anger.”
Theoretical explanations include:
- Informational social influence
- Normative social influence
- Referent informational influence
Deutsch & Gerard (1955) - Informational social influence:
- “Accept information as evidence of reality”
- Goal to make accurate and valid judgments
- Evidence:
- Sherif’s 1936 autokinetic study on norm formation (ambiguous stimuli)
- Meta-analysis on Ash-like experiments found that conformity was significantly higher the more ambiguous the stimulus (Bond & Smith, 1996).
Deutsch & Gerard (1955) - normative social influence:
- “To conform with the positive expectations of another”
- Need for social approval or harmony
- compliance (public) without acceptance (private)
- Evidence:
- Asch variation with answers written down when faced with incorrect majority: 12.5% conformity rate.
- Deutsch and Gerard (1955) experiment
Turner (1982); Hogg & Turner (1987):
- Referent informational influence
· Adopt the norms, beliefs and behaviours of the prototypical ingroup member
· Maximises similarities between ingroup members and differences between ingroup and outgroup members
· Evidence:- See Abrams et al. (1990). British Journal of Social Psychology, 29, 97-199, especially experiments 1 and 2
- Meta-analysis by Bond & Smith (1996): lower conformity when the majority consist of out-group members
Asch paradigm:
· If the others are outgroup members, conformity should decrease
Social influence in the digital age - (In)exposure to different views:
· Filter bubbles: social media feeding us personalized (targeted) content through algorithm, content from “people like us”, content that is consistent with our views. (e.g. ads, newsfeed etc).
· With social media we now have access to ways of hearing the views of others who are similar to us.
