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Social influence (Y1) - Coggle Diagram
Social influence (Y1)
Minority influence
Moscovici (1969) - criticised 'conformity bias' in previous social psychological research
- Individuals have agency, and individuals can influence large majorities
- Cannot explain norm change, innovation and conflict
- Asch's conformity studies = studies of minority rather than majority influence (because in general population, actors would be minority)
- Initiated program of research to explore minority influence
Conversion theory - dual process model -
- Majority influence -> direct public compliance; people passively accept what majority have to say, little or no private attitude change short term - NSI or ISI
- Minority influence -> indirect, latent, private change - people have to think about minority and try to understand them
- More enduring
- Occurs through process of conversion - minorities force us to think twice
- Minority influence is different to majority in both process and effect
- Flexibility, consistency and commitment - draw attention, show flexibility and consistency, cognitive conflict / deeper processing, augmentation principle, snowball effect and social cryptomnesia
Conversion effect - sudden, dramatic and internal change in majority - impacts direction of attention, content of thinking and differential influence
- Maass and Clark (1983) - public views mirror majority but private views reflect minority opinions
Boundary conditions - although minorities can be influential, not all minorities are
- Consistent minorities are more successful because they convey credibility draw attention to the minority as an entity, disrupt the majority norm and point to change as the only solution
- Consistent minorities create conflict that can only be resolved through conversion
- Consistency evidence - Moscovici, Lage and Naffrechoux (1969)
- Dissenters, deviates or independents
- Minorities are less numerous, less legitimate authority and less worthy of serious consideration
- Social change could not happen without minority influence innovating new ideas
Conformity bias -
- In social influence research, there is a tendency to suggest people conform to majorities because they are dependent on them for normative and informational reasons
- Social influence is also beneficial for status quo and uniformity reasons
- However, innovation and normative change are sometimes needed, which is where social influence gets in the way
- The certainty in which we hold views lies in the amount of agreements we encounter for those views ambiguity and uncertainty are not properties of objects but of other people’s disagreement with us
Moscovici (1976) believed that there is disagreement and conflict within groups, with three social influence modalities that define how people respond to these social conflicts
- Conformity - majority influence in which the majority persuades the minority or deviates to adopt the majority viewpoint
- Normalisation - mutual compromise leading to convergence
- Innovation - a minority aims to create and accentuate conflict to persuade the majority to adopt the minority viewpoint
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Conversion theory
How a member of the majority processes the minority’s message
- Majority influence - produces direct public compliance for reasons of normative or informational dependence - people engage in a comparison process where they focus on what others say to fit in with them - majority views accepted passively without much thought - outcome is public compliance with majority views
- Minority influence - indirect, latent, private change in opinion due to the cognitive conflict and restructuring that deviant ideas produce - people engage in a validation process where they carefully examine and cogitate over the validity of beliefs
- Outcome of little or no overt public agreement with the minority, for fear of being viewed as a member of the minority, but private internal change may only happen later
- Conversion effect - direction of attention (message focus), content of thinking (deeper processing) and differential influence (produces private rather than public agreement)Majority is instead direct, immediate behavioural compliance
Convergent-divergent theory - Nemeth (1986, 1995) - minority / majority differences
- Because we are expected to share attitudes with the majority, when we do not this is surprising and stressful, and leads to self-protective narrowing of focus of attention
- Produces convergent thinking that inhibits consideration of alternative views
- Because we do not expect to agree with the minority, when we do disagree this is not surprising and leads to divergent thinking of many views
- Exposure to minority views therefore stimulates innovation and creativity, by generating more diverse thinking
Social identity - Turner and David (2001)
- Ingroup minorities have the problem of the majority group making intragroup social comparisons that highlight and accentuate the minority’s otherness, essentially concretising a majority v minority intergroup contrast
- Key way to cause minority influence is for the minority to shift the majority’s level of social comparison to focus on intergroup comparisons with a genuine shared outgroup
- This allows the minority to become an ingroup by comparison of a more different outgroup
Attribute theory -
- Consistent, committed and flexible minorities encourage people to listen and consider their position
- Social impact theory - source of influence increases influence relative to size, but as the cumulative power increases, each individual source is reduced - additional people to a minority influence has more impact than a majority
Vested interest and leniency contract -
- More influential if they can avoid being categorised by the majority as a despised outgroup
- Challenge for minority to be able to achieve this at the same time as promulgating an unwaveringly consistent alternative viewpoint that differs from the majority position - have to be an outgroup and an ingroup
- Crano’s context-comparison model of minority influence describes how minorities can establish legitimate ingroup credentials before drawing undue critical attention to the distinct minority outgroup viewpoint
- Ingroup minorities can be quite persuasive - message is distinct, attracts attention and elaboration, and there is little derogatory threat
- Outgroups just derogatory
- When messages involve strong or vested (inflexible and absolute) attitudes, it is more difficult for a minority to prevail
- Leniency contract - majority assumes because minority is an ingroup, it is unlikely to destroy any core attitudes and so they are more lenient to their views
Compliance
Superficial, public and transitory changes in behaviour and expressed attitudes in response to requests, coercion or group pressure
Tactics to persuade compliance -
- ingratiation; getting someone to like you
- Multiple requests -
-> Foot in the door - small request followed by a big one
-> Door in the face - big request denied, follow up with true smaller request
-> Low ball - change terms of request after they have already committed, causing a sunk cost fallacy assessment
Ways to resist compliance -
- Reactance; thought of losing autonomy and freedom leads to a severe rejection of compliance attempts - deliberate persuasion fails
- Inoculation - exposed to smaller doses of compliance which we resist, building up ability to resist larger attempts
- Selective avoidance - tendency to expose oneself to information we agree with / avoid exposure to contradiction
- Forewarning - knowledge - being aware of the persuasion
- Adorno - authoritarian personality as disobedience; Elms and Milgram, locus of control and social support
Often only persists under surveillance - power is the basis of compliance because if the target of influence has less power than the authority, they will comply
- Strategic control over behaviour for self presentation and communication amplifies difficulty with observing full internalisation
- Other forms of social influence produces private acceptance and internalisation - subjective acceptance and conversion
- Conformity is based on the validity of social norms
- Reference groups - psychologically significant for people's attitudes and behaviour as we seek to use them as a basis of norms or use them as an opposition point
-> Positive reference group is a source of conformity
-> negative reference group is a coercive power to produce compliance
-> Difference between coercive compliance and persuasive influence - dual-process dependency model, in which you comply with your membership group but conform to reference groups
-> Turner (1991) - two processes of dependency on others for social approval and for information about reality
- Membership groups - groups to which we belong by some objective criterion, external designation or social consensus
- Reject the negative reference group, accept membership and conform to positive reference group
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Obedience and authority
- Agentic state - absolve ourselves of responsibility by transferring it to an authority figure (agentic shift from autonomous state)
- Legitimacy of authority - Milgram variations of location, proximity and uniform
- Authoritarian personality - Adorno and Elms and Milgram Milgram replicated in many cultures, gender groups and ages and same effect is found
- Variations of immediacy may prevent dehumanisation of the victim making it easier to empathise and avoid obedience
Reasons why -
- Foot in the door obedience - started with small tasks, now committed to course of action
- His research addresses the tendency for people to obey orders without first thinking about what they are being asked to do and the consequences of their obedience for others
- However, obedience can also be beneficial for most workplaces and governments as well as emergency teams
- Pitfalls of blind obedience, due to immediacy, group pressure, norms and legitimacy are an issue - medication errors in hospital are mainly due to nurses blindly obeying doctors despite concerns (Lesar et al, 1977)
- Pharmaceutical scenario - 77% of people agreed to a hazardous drug because of the chair of the board (Brief, Dukerich and Doran, 1991)
Cialdini and Goldstein (2004) -
- Milgram’s participants were still troubled by the orders - not thoughtless obedience, experimenter also had expert authority
- Social identity theory of leadership - Haslam and Reicher, 2012; results reflect group-membership-based-leadership rather than obedience to an authority figure
- Looked for certainty in an ambiguous situation
Ethics -
- Influenced ethical guidelines - issues of withdrawal, deception, harm and debriefing
- However, benefits outweighed the costs
- Reasons for deception - convince into an unpleasant experiment, and to study automatic processes that require hypothesis naivety
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Power and influence
Power - capacity or ability to exert influence, and influence is power in action:
Six bases of social power - Raven, 1959:
- Reward power - ability to promise rewards for compliance
- Coercive power - threaten punishment for non-compliance
- Informational power - target’s belief that the influencer has more information than oneself
- Expert power - target’s belief that the influencer has generally greater expertise and knowledge than oneself
- Legitimate power - influencer is authorised by a recognised power structure to command and make decision
- Referent power - identification with attraction to or respect for the source of influence
Reinforcement formulations tend to be unfalsifiable - focus more on cognitive and social processes as punishment and reward tend to be respectively decided
- Information paired with other persuasion influences is effective - experts are more persuasive
- Legitimate power rests on authority and is a consideration for obedience
- Referent power may operate through a range of processes, including consensual validation, social approval and group identification - those who believe they have legitimate power are also more likely to take action to pursue goals - empowered (Galinsky, Gruenfeld and Magee, 2003)
- Social cognitive and attributional analysis of power imbalance in a group (Fiske, 1993)
Moscovici - power and influence are two different processes - power is control through dominance and produces compliance and submission, and thus you do not need influence
- If you can influence, you do not need power
- Power can also be a role in a group defined by effective influence over others - most leaders gain power and persuasion by causing internalisation of their views, through charisma and legitimate authority
- Power could be a social construct rather than a cause of effective leadership, and leadership could be associated more as a conformity process acting as a positive reference group people want membership of
- Turner (2005) - criticised traditional perspectives on power and influence (that power resides in control of resources and is the basis of influence that psychologically attaches people to groups) whereas Turner suggests attachment to and influence with a group is the basis of influence Influence = power, power = resource control
- Social identity theory of conceptualisation of influence in groups
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Conformity
People constructs norms from other people’s behaviour in order to determine correct and appropriate behaviour for themselves - if you are confident about what is appropriate and correct, other’s behaviour is irrelevant and not influential
- Ambiguity in Sherif’s study created a norm which influenced behaviour
Individual and group characteristics of those that conform -
- Those who conform tend to have low self esteem, high need for social support or approval, a need for self control, low IQ, high anxiety, feelings of self-blame and insecurity in the group, feelings of inferiority, feelings of relatively low status in the group and an authoritarian personality
- However, some people conform to some situations not others, suggesting situational factors have a role and are more important than personality
Eagly - gender difference in conformity - women influenced when they have less expertise than men, same in the opposite condition - but, conform equally on gender neutral stimuli (Sistrunk and McDavid, 1971)
- Women conform more than men in public interactive settings, due to a higher concern for group harmony (Eagly, 1978)
- Women conform equally in public and private situations, but men are more resistant in public settings (Eagly, Wood and Fishbaugh, 1981)
Why people do not conform - Hodges et al, 2014
- Speaking-from-ignorance effect - layperson is invited by a group of experts to offer an opinion Asch - people are telling the truth as they see it, and thus react when the experts weigh in and correct it
Cultural influence - Collectivist cultures conform more than individualistic cultures (Smith et al, 2006)
- Collectivist cultures see conformity as a positive thing as it provides a form of social cohesion, whereas individualist cultures see it as a negative loss of freedom of thought
Summary - people seem to go against their own beliefs and harm others when instructed to do so by an authority figure
- People use the opinions of others as a guide in situations that are ambiguous / uncertain
- But, even in certain situations, social pressure can produce conformity to the majority
- Minorities can be effective because they cause latent cognitive change as a consequence of challenging the majority's perspective