week 6 - social influence Flashcards
(40 cards)
What is the definition of social influence?
Many different definitions:
- Hogg & Vaughan (2005): ‘process whereby attitudes and behaviours are influenced by the real or implied presence of other people’
- Hewstone & Martin (2015): ‘change of attitudes, beliefs, opinions, values, and behaviour, as a result of being exposed to other individuals’ attitudes, beliefs, opinions, values and behaviour’
What are the key functions of social norms?
- reduce uncertainty about how to behave in certain situations
- coordinate individual behaviour
- help with distribution of outcomes in a group (division of social resources, e.g. wealth, obligations)
- note, norms are not necessarily static, but potentially dynamic (norms may change depending on context)
- evaluative: violating norms leads to negative responses (allows people to decide if someone should be kept in the group or ostracised)
- descriptive and injunctive (help explain what is going on in a situation, and what will happen next)
- communicated implicityly, explicitly and through inference
What was Sherif’s (1936) study on Socially Facilitated Influence?
- the mere presence of others creates a form of influence over our attitudes and behaviours: socially facilitated influence
- Autokinetic effect study investigated this influence:
- Autokinetic effect is a phenomenon where without any frame of reference we begin to percieve a single light as moving because of the very faint muscular movements of our eyes
- optical illusion
- pitch black room, point of light 5 meters away
What was the method of Sherif’s 1936 study using the autokinetic effect investigating socially facilitated influence?
- participants took part individually and as part of groups
- participants had to give an oral estimate of how much they thought the light had moved
- half the participants took part individually and then came together in groups where everyone called out their estimate
- the other half of participants took part as groups and then individually
What were the results of Sherif’s 1936 study investigating socially facilitated influence?
Individual-to-group condition
- participants taking part individually developed a standard estimate (personal norm not influenced by other’s opinions)
- this norm was stable and persisted through initial attempts to become a group norm, but varied widely in terms of estimate of light movement size between participants
- when taking part individually, there are large differences in estimates of how far the light moved
- when participants came together in session 2, they start to converge their thinking, and by the 4th session, there is a group norm of them agreeing on how far the light moved.
- their personal norms were replaced by group norms
Group-to-individual condition
- when starting in groups, participants gave very similar estimates from the start
- when split into individual responses, this group norm persisted across trials
- on the 4th trial we see a bit of variation, but nowhere near the level of variation seen within the first trial of the other condition
Showed the power of norms to endure and transfer to new settings where there isnt a group - reciprocal influence
- all exerting influence on eachother just by stating their response out loud
What are the 3 types of social influence?
- compliance
- conformity
- obedience
What is compliance?
- a behavioural phenomena
- a clear public change in behaviour
- doesn’t necessarily include a private change in attitude
- a temporary type of conformity
- research has focused on factors affecting compliance
What is the ‘foot-in-the-door’ technique of compliance?
where you deliberatley start with a small request and the excelate to a much bigger request. agreeing to the small request makes someone more likely to agree to the bigger one.
- frequently used in sales (e.g. pay small fee for first month of a membership, then the price goes up)
How did Freedman & Fraser (1966) demonstrate the ‘foot in the door’ technique of compliance?
- asked participants if they could come and do a 2 hour survey at their home of household product use. This would involve 5-6 men going into their house and taking an inventory of all their products
- just over 20% of people complied with this request
- When the same question was asked after participants had agreed to take part in a short telephone survey, just over 50% complied
Why does the foot in the door technique for compliance work?
- one theory suggests we infer who we are from what we do: if we are helpful on the first occasion, we must be a helpful person, and so we should be helpful on the second occasion (Bem, 1967)
what is the ‘door-in-the-face’ technique of compliance?
‘foot-in-the-door’ techniques suggests making a big request first shouldn’t be successful, however…
door in the face
- big request first = unlikely to be successful
- follow it with more reasonable request = greater likelihood of compliance than if 2nd request presented in isolation
What example shows the ‘door-in-the-face’ technique of compliance works?
Cialdini et al. (1975)
- asked uni students ‘will you volunteer at a young offenders institute for 2 hrs a week for the next 2 years’ - minimal compliance
- then students were asked ‘will you take these young offenders to the zoo?’
- after the 1st request, 50% compliance
- without the first request, the zoo question only recieved 17% compliance
the 2nd request is perceived as a concession on the part of the requester
- as the requester has been kind enough to back down from their initial request, we feel like we should reciprocate in kind of some way
What method did Harari et al. (1980) find most effective, door in face, or foot in door?
study investigated how students could make lecturers comply with their requests.
students asked for help from lecturers:
- C1: DIF - meet for 2 hours a week (ask for even longer meeting first)
- C2: FID - meet for 15-20 minutes
- C3: Control - no initial request
results showed DIF technique worked best, with 78% of lecturers saying yes.
- since foot in the door involves a large request being asked right after the first small one was accepted, it is thought to have violated social norms and seemed rude (only 33.3% acceptance)
- FID may be more effective if there is a delay between asking the larger request
What is conformity?
- compliance research focuses on how we respond to individual attempts at social influence
- conformity is more concerned with group influence
conformity is:
- more indirect form of influence
- behaviour guided by group norms
- affects attitudes as well as behaviour
- consists of 2 types: informational versus normative influence
what is normative influence?
the desire to be liked/accepted by the group
what is informational influence?
The desire to be right
- people change their beliefs, opinions, or behaviors based on information from others
Informational versus normative: What influence did Sherif believe was present in his autokinesis study?
- Sherif said people may assume that other group member have a more accurate judgement than they do
- informational influence: participants had the desire to be right in ambiguous situations
What did Asch (1952) criticise about Sherif’s autokinesis study?
- Asch was critical of Sherif’s conclusion that informational influence strongly affected participant choices in his study
- Asch said Sherif’s study results show no clear ‘right’ answer
- people might comform to group norms in ambiguous situations, but what about when there is an obvious & objective criteria on which to base one’s judgement?
Asch’s solution: Line length judgement experiment
What is Asch’s (1952) line length experiment?
- participants were shown 3 lines, and asked which of the lines (A, B, or C) were the same length as the target line
- this was done in groups of 7-9, where all other group members were confederates who had been instructed to give the wrong answer
- 50% of participants conformed to the group majority and gave the wrong answer in at least one trial
- without the group (control condition), less than 1% gave the wrong answer
after the experiment, Asch asked participants why they conformed:
- confusion
- group pressure
- fear of judgement
- feelings of anxiety
- group may have been right
- didnt want to stand out
shows both normative and informational influence: we dont like to go against the trend, even if we have grounds to do so
Why does normative influence occur?
research shows group influence exerts massive power over behaviour, above and beyond anything else within social influence
- Normative influence: occurs because of pressures to ‘fit in’ with a group, or more broadly with what we perceive to be expectations about what we should do
What was the most common response over all of Asch’s line experiment trials?
While 50% of participants conformed in at least one of the trials (usually due to normative influence), the most common response over all of the trials was resistance
- participants began in the first trials resisting the group, but later began to conform
- is it the group influencing our decisions, or just the consistency of which participants were provided the false information?
What is Moscovici’s (1976) Minority Influence?
Argued that if social influence only depended on the majority, it would be hard to understand how groups could change and any innovation could occur. how do minorities influence majorities?
- minorities require a particular behavioural style to overcome majority rejection: consistency
- when minorities are persistent, they can succeed in influencing a majority
How did Moscovici et al. (1969) test minority influence?
- 6 participants (2 were confederates) presented with a series of slides unambiguously blue and differed only in light intensity (different shades)
- participants had to say the colour of the slide
- in one condition there were two confederates who answered green on every trial (in the others they answered green 1 to 2/3 of the time)
- incorrect guesses rose from 0.25% to 8.42% when confederates were consistent and persistent (voted green on every trial)
What is Conversion Theory? (Moscovici, 1980)
- theory states that both minorities and majorities can cause influence, but they do so in different ways by getting people to focus on different aspects of a situation.
Majority influence
influences via comparison
leads to compliance
- direct
- immediate
- temporary
Minority influence
influences via validation
leads to conversion
- indirect
- delayed
- durable
it involves a desire to understand the deviant group (the people thinking differently from us). it encourages a deep processing of the minorities position. (why do they not conform as you have?). minorities lead to private or late influence. causes a subtle change in attitudes that participants may not be aware of consciously as they consider the minority group’s position.
- this private conversion may be cautiously communicated to others which eventually become public
- as people start to acknowledge agreement with the minority position, a new social norm is created, resulting in long term attitude changes
