Social and Organizational Psychology

IBP 2017-2018

Social influence

Social influence: efforts by one or more people to change the behavior, attitudes, or feelings of one or more others

Forms of influence:

• Conformity 
• Compliance
• Obedience
• Unintentional social influence

Conformity: efforts to change others’ behavior through norms about how to behave in a given situation

• First systematically studied by Solomon Asch
• Formal: as in speed limits, rules for playing games
• Informal: as in the general rule “ don’t stare at people on an elevator”
• Cohesiveness: degree of attraction felt by an individual toward some group, group size, and type of social norm operating in that situation
  •  Descriptive norms: describe what most people do in a given situation
  •  Injunctive norms: specify how people should behave in a given situation
• Motives to conform:
  • The desire to be liked by others (normative social influence)
  •  the desire to be right or accurate (informational social influence)
• Motives to not conform:
  • Being perceived as being higher in status than those who conform
  • Conformity can induce good people to perform bad actions (e.g.: Stanford prison experiment)

Compliance: efforts to change others’ behavior through direct requests

• Foot-in-the-door technique: presenting target people with a small request and then following up with a larger request
•  Lowball procedure: After the customer accepts the good offer, something happens that makes it necessary for the salesperson to change the deal and make it less advantageous for the customer
• Door-in-the-face: starting with a very large request and then, after this is rejected, shift to a smaller request
• Playing hard to get and the deadline technique: based on the principle of scarcity, where what is scarce or hard to obtain is seen as valuable

Obedience: following direct orders or commands from others

• Many people obey orders from authorities, even if these orders require them to do harm (Milgram’s experiment)
• How it works:
  • People are more willing to obey when the authority is responsible for their actions
  • They see signs of authority which remind them of the norm “obey those in authority”
  • There is a gradual escalation of the scope of the commands given
  • The rapid pace with which such situations proceed gives no time to reflect

Unintentional social influence: influence that occurs when other people change our behavior without intending to do so

• Emotional contagion: instances in which our own emotions are influenced by those of others even when they do not intend to produce such effects
• Symbolic social influence: occurs when our thoughts about others influence our actions or thoughts even if they are not present
• Modeling: we learn from observing the actions of others or use them as a guide to our own behavior in situations where it is not clear how we should behave

References:

Baron, R., & Branscombe, N. (2016). Social psychology (14th edition) Harlow: Pearson Education Limited

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