Social Influence

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, socialization, peer pressure, obedience, leadership, persuasion, sales and marketing.

Three broad varieties of social influence:

Compliance is when people appear to agree with others, but actually keep their dissenting opinions private.

Identification is when people are influenced by someone who is liked and respected, such as a famous celebrity.

Internalization is when people accept a belief or behavior and agree both publicly and privately.

1. Compliance

Compliance is the act of responding favorably to an explicit or implicit 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.

The satisfaction derived from compliance is due to the social effect of the accepting influence (i.e. people comply for an expected reward or punishment-aversion)

Compliance refers to a response — specifically, a submission — made in reaction to a request. The request may be explicit or implicit.

2. Identification:

Identification is a psychological process whereby the subject assimilates an aspect, property, or attribute of the other and is transformed, wholly or partially, by the model the other provides.

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”.

3. 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, and the “reward” of internalization is “the content of the new behavior”.

Conformity

Conformity is a type of social influence involving a change in behavior, belief or thinking to align with those of others or to align with normative standards. It is the most common and pervasive form of social influence.

Conformity is the act of matching attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors to group norms. Norms are implicit, unsaid rules, shared by a group of individuals, that guide their interactions with others. This tendency to conform occurs in small groups and/or society as a whole, and may result from subtle unconscious influences, or direct and overt social pressure.

Conformity can occur in the presence of others, or when an individual is alone. For example, people tend to follow social norms when eating or watching television, even when alone.

Conformity is sometimes in appearance only – publicly appearing to conform(compliance) or it may be a complete conformity that impacts an individual both publicly and privately (conversion).

What appears to be conformity may in fact be congruence. Congruence occurs when an individual’s behavior, belief or thinking is already aligned with that of the others and there is no change.

Another type of social response, which does not involve conformity with the majority of the group, is called convergence. In this type of social response the group member agreed with the groups’ decision from the outset and thus does not need to shift their opinion on the matter at hand.

As conformity is a group phenomenon, factors such as group size, unanimity, cohesion, status, prior commitment and public opinion help determine the level of conformity an individual displays.

Why Conformity occurs?

In the case of peer pressure, a person is convinced to do something (such as smoking) 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.

People often conform from a desire for security within a group—typically a group of a similar age, culture, religion, or educational status. This is often referred to asgroupthink: a pattern of thought characterized by self-deception, forced manufacture of consent, and conformity to group values and ethics, which ignores realistic appraisal of other courses of action. Unwillingness to conform carries the risk of social rejection. (Social rejection occurs when an individual is deliberately excluded from a social relationship or social interaction for social rather than practical reasons.)

Nonconformity

In situations where conformity (including compliance, conversion and congruence) is absent, there are non-conformity processes such as independence and anti-conformity.

Nonconformity can fall into one of two response categories. First, an individual who does not conform to the majority can display independence. Independence, or dissent, can be defined as the unwillingness to bend to group pressures. Thus, this individual stays true to his or her personal standards instead of the swaying toward group standards.

Also, a nonconformist could be displaying anticonformity or counter conformity which involves the taking of opinions that are opposite to what the group believes. This type of nonconformity can be motivated by a need to rebel against the status quo instead of the need to be accurate in one’s opinion.

Hence, social responses to conformity can be seen to vary along a continuum from conversion to anticonformity.

Predictors of Conformity

(a) Culture:

Culture appears to play a role in willingness to conform to a group. It is found that conformity was higher in Norway than in France. This has been attributed to Norway’s long standing tradition of social responsibility, as compared to France’s cultural focus on individualism. Japan likewise has a collectivist culture and thus a higher propensity to conform.

(b) Sex:

Women are more persuadable and more conforming than men in group pressure situations that involve surveillance. In situations not involving surveillance, women are less likely to conform. This sex difference may be due to different sex roles in society. Women are generally taught to be more agreeable whereas men are taught to be more independent.

It was found that men and women conformed more when there were participants of both sexes involved versus participants of the same sex.

(c) Age:

In the same way that gender has been viewed as corresponding to status, age has also been argued to have status implications. Age as a status role can be observed among college students. Younger students, such as those in their first year in college, are treated as lower-status individuals and older college students are treated as higher-status individuals. Therefore, given these status roles, it would be expected that younger individuals (low status) conform to the majority whereas older individuals (high status) would be expected not to conform.

(d) Size of the group:

Although conformity pressures generally increase as the size of the majority increases, a meta-analysis suggests that conformity pressures peak once the majority reaches about four or five in number.

Moreover, a study suggests that the effects of group size depend on the type of social influence operating. This means that in situations where the group is clearly wrong, conformity will be motivated by normative influence; the participants will conform in order to be accepted by the group. A participant may not feel much pressure to conform when the first person gives an incorrect response. However, conformity pressure will increase as each additional group member also gives the same incorrect response.

Informational Social Influence:

Informational social influence occurs when one turns to the members of one’s group to obtain and accept accurate information about reality. A person is most likely to use informational social influence in certain situations: when a situation is ambiguous, people become uncertain about what to do and they are more likely to depend on others for the answer; and during a crisis when immediate action is necessary.

Looking to other people can help ease fears, but unfortunately they are not always right. The more knowledgeable a person is, the more valuable they are as a resource. Thus people often turn to experts for help. But once again people must be careful, as experts can make mistakes too.

Normative social influence:

Normative social influence is a type of social influence leading to conformity. Normative social influence occurs when one conforms to be liked or accepted by the members of the group. When people do not conform with their group and therefore are deviants, they are less liked and even punished by the group. Normative influence usually results in public compliance, doing or saying something without believing in it.

Persuasion

 Persuasion plays important role in attitude formation and change.It is systematic effort to bring about change in attitude and behaviour of target group.In this source of  persuasion has vested interest. It consists of a persuader, persuadee and persuasive appeal.

Persuasion consists of four steps:

1.Attention- It is important process for persuasion ,without it no effect on target will take place.It is considered as degree of awareness of the message by the target.

2. Comprehension- After attention individaul or target comprehands or understnds the message.

3.Acceptance- After understnding, a message is more likely accepted if it is socially approved

4. Retention- storing of accepted message in memory and then acting upon major points of message.

Persuasion is also decided by the characteristics of source, message and receiver.

Source characteristics-

Credibility:  It is the believability of source. I t is decided by two factor- experience and trustworthiness .Experience is knowledge or skills a source appears to have while trustworthiness includes truthfulness of the source.

Attractiveness: It includes physical attractiveness, pleasantness, attitudinal similarity, similarity in socio-cultural background. A message from caring and liked source is accepted while message from disliked source is discarded or it produces negative effects.

Power: Source with power to reward or punish target group will yield enormous influence over it

Message characteristics-

• Suggestions
• Fear appeal
• Sidedness of the message
• Ordering of message
• Emotional and factual appeal
• Active participation
• Position advocated in the message
• Channel factor
• Receiver  characteristics-
• Selective exposure
• Selective attention
• Selective interpretation
• Personality characteristics such as sex of the receiver, self-esteem, intelligence, social background of the receiver.

Resistance to persuasion-

• Forewarning the audience about the persuasive information of the source
• By derogating the source
• By immunization

Steps to make effective persuasion

• Use face to face communication
• Unambiguous message
• Non-verbal communication in congruence with verbal message
• Develop empathy with audience
• Utilize medium which is best suited for persuasion

Factors Influencing Attitude Change

• Valence,extremeness,complexity and centrality of attitude
• Direction and extent of attitude change. Congruent attitude change are easier than Incongruent attitudes.
• Fear content of persuasive message and over all persuasion method.