Understanding Social Influence

• Social influence is how people affect each other through actions, comments, or even presence.

Types of Social Influence

• Conformity, Compliance, and Obedience are types of social influence
• Social influence can be implicit or explicit

Key Functions of Social Influence

• Social learning is promoted through understanding social norms and behaviors
• It facilitates group cohesion by aligning behavior with group expectations.
• Shapes moral and cultural norms by transmitting values across generations.
• Social influence regulates behavior by encouraging conformity and discouraging deviance.

Types of Social Influence

• Informational social influence results from taking others' actions as information about what is correct or effective, and tends to be prescriptive.
• Normative social influence arises from the desire to avoid disapproval or social sanctions; hence people desire to adhere to social norms.

Normative vs. Informational Social Influence:

• Normative: Driven by the desire to be liked and avoid disapproval, key emotion is fear of rejection or ridicule, and the outcome is public compliance.
• Informational: Driven by the desire to be correct and make accurate judgments, key emotion is uncertainty or lack of knowledge, and the outcome is private acceptance.

Social Influence: Conformity

• Conformity involves changing behavior or beliefs due to real or imagined pressure.
• Negative conformity is driven by a desire for social acceptance or fear of rejection, such as agreeing with a group's wrong answer to avoid standing out.
• Informational conformity occurs when others are viewed as a source of accurate information, like agreeing with a group's answer because they are experts.
• Private conformity is internal acceptance, whereas public conformity is outward compliance.

Social Influence: Compliance

• Compliance involves responding favorably to an explicit request from someone else.
• An example of compliance is agreeing to a favor without any authority required

Social Influence: Obedience

• Obedience involves submitting to the demands of someone in authority within an unequal power dynamic.
• Following a police officer's orders is an example of obedience

Differences In Social Influence Types

• Similarities include influence by others, changes in behavior/thoughts/feelings, and being driven by social norms or pressure.
• Differences include source of influence being authority for obedience, peer/group for conformity, and individual for compliance.
• Obedience and compliance are direct, while conformity is more implicit.
• Conformity and compliance are more voluntary than obedience.

Conformity

• Conformity can be adaptive and can eliminate potential conflict and smooth human interaction, but can also be harmful or risky.
• Conformity can be seen in actions like suppressing anger, paying taxes, forming lines at the theater, and staying on the right side of the road.
• Harmful examples include pulling a prank with a crowd (mob rule) or engaging in risky drug use

Sherif's Conformity Experiment

• Sherif's autokinetic illusion study demonstrated how a stationary light in a dark room appears to move, and people's judgments about the movement converged over time.
• Informational social influence is more likely when the situation is ambiguous/difficult or when one feels low in knowledge/competence about the topic.

Normative Social Influence and Asch's Conformity Experiment

• Asch's line judgment study (1956) involved judging whether two lines were the same length
• In the group, there was one true participant among seven confederates of the experimenter, who gave wrong answers.
• 75% of participants conformed at least once, and overall, participants conformed 33% of the time.
• Desire for approval likely caused conformity on the line judgment task to avoid being deviant since the correct answer was obvious

Factors Affecting Conformity Pressure

• More conformity occurs when a group is unanimous. Conformity rates decrease dramatically if even one person breaks the unanimity.
• Anonymity eliminates normative social influence, substantially reducing conformity and increasing internalization, which is private acceptance.
• High status or expert group members exert more social influence. Experts exert more informational, and high status exerts more normative influence.

Culture

• Studies show higher conformity rates in interdependent cultures.
• Members of interdependent cultures worry about fitting into social context more than members of independent cultures.

Behavior Explanation

• Conformity decreases when understanding reasons for others' behaviors, such as bias or self-interest.
• Conformity decreases with an obvious explanation for a deviant opinion, like relevant group minority status.