SOCIAL INFLUENCE: DEFINITION, THEORIES, TYPES - PSYCHOLOGY - 2024

The social influence is a change in the judgments, opinions or attitudes of an individual to be exposed to the judgments, opinions and attitudes of others. The process of social influence has been the focus of attention for students of Social Psychology since the 20th century.

The atrocities committed during the First and Second World War raised concerns about the degree of influence that could be exercised over people, especially when it came to obeying orders and following the group's schemes.

There are several phenomena studied that are related to social influence and which are known to cause these changes to occur in individuals. The most investigated have been those related to the influence of the majority, the change due to the minority effect, the influence of the group when making decisions and obedience to authority.

Types of social influence

There are several types of social influence:

Internalization

Internalization is the process of accepting a set of norms established by people or groups that are influential to the individual.

ID

Identification is the change of attitudes or behaviors due to the influence of someone who is admired.

Obedience

Obedience is a form of social influence that derives from an authority figure.

Self-fulfilling prophecy

A self-fulfilling prophecy is a prediction that directly or indirectly comes true due to positive feedback between belief and behavior.

Propaganda

Propaganda is information that is not objective and is used primarily to influence an audience and infuse them with a particular vision or perception of someone or something.

Accordance

Conformity is a type of social influence that involves a change in behavior, beliefs, or thinking to align with those of others or with normative standards.

Influence of minorities

Minority influence occurs when a majority is influenced to accept the beliefs or behaviors of a minority.

Compliance (psychology)

Compliance is the act of responding favorably to an explicit or implicit request offered by others. It is a change in behavior, but not necessarily in attitude; one can comply due to mere obedience or social pressure.

Handling

Psychological manipulation aims to change the behavior or perception of others through abusive or deceptive or shady tactics.

Conformity and influence of the majority

The influence of the majority is understood to be what happens when a few people of the same opinion, affects the beliefs and thoughts of another so much that they change what they really think.

To explain this phenomenon, the results found by Sherif (1935) and Asch (1951) in their respective experiments on the process according to the majority have been used.

Sherif's experiment: the autokinetic effect

Sherif (1935) was one of the first to study the effect of social influence. To do this, he placed a few subjects inside a dark booth, where he presented them with a point of light at a distance of approximately five meters so that they could experience the so-called “auto-kinetic effect”.

The autokinetic effect is an optical illusion that occurs when the movement of a luminous point projected in the dark is perceived, when in reality there is no movement at all.

The task that the subjects had to carry out was to determine how far, according to them, the point of light that was projected traveled.

Sherif divided the experiment into two phases. In the first, the subjects had to carry out the task individually and later, in the second, they met in groups of two or three people and reached a consensus on the distance that the point of light had traveled.

Subjects first made their judgments on the movement of light alone. Subsequently, in the group, a consensus was established to determine at what distance it oscillated, taking into account the average of the estimates given previously individually.

After this, the subjects were asked if they thought their opinion had been influenced by the rest of the group and they answered no.

However, when they returned to perform the task alone, the judgment made on the distance of the movement of the light, was closer to the opinion given by the group more than to what was said individually in the first task.

Asch experiment

On the other hand, in this same paradigm of study of conformity we find the study of Asch.

For his research, Asch invited seven students to participate in a visual discrimination experiment, in which they were presented with three lines to compare with another that acted as a pattern.

In each of the comparisons, there was one line the same as the standard line and two different ones. The subjects had to repeatedly decide which of the three lines presented were similar in length to the standard line.

In each round, the participant exposed to the experiment gave a clear and fairly confident answer in private. Subsequently, he was seated in a circle with other participants previously manipulated by the experimenter into giving false answers about the lines.

In the results of the experiment, it is observed that the public responses that the subjects gave were much more influenced by the judgments of the rest of the "false" participants than the private responses.

Normative influence and informational influence

The processes of normative influence and informational influence of the majority, occur when people have to express a judgment about some aspect in the presence of others.

When individuals find themselves in these situations, they have two main concerns: they want to be right and they want to make a good impression on others.

To determine what it is to be right, they use two sources of information: what your senses indicate and what others tell you. Thus, the experimental situation developed by Asch confronts these two sources of information and presents the individual with the conflict of having to choose one of the two.

If in these circumstances the individual conforms, that is, he lets himself be carried away by what the majority says rather than by what his senses tell him, what is known as informational influence is produced.

On the other hand, this conformity to the beliefs of the majority may also be due to the tendency we have to give in to pressure from the group to be more attractive to them and to value us in a more positive way.

In that case, the conformity caused by this desire to be liked or by the aversion to being rejected by the majority of the group is due to normative influence.

Both processes of influence produce different effects:

Normative influence

It changes the manifest behavior of the individual, keeping his previous beliefs and thoughts private. It results in a public compliance or submission process. Example: a person pretends that she likes to drink alcohol and does it to please her new friends, even though she really hates it.

Informational influence

Behavior and opinion are modified, giving a private agreement or conversion.

Example: a person has never tried alcohol and is not attracted to it, but begins to go out with some friends who love to "make a bottle." In the end, this person ends up drinking alcohol every weekend and loves it.

Innovation or minority influence

Although minorities seem to have little effect on influencing individuals' behavior and / or attitude change, it has been shown that they do have some power to do so.

While the method of majority influence was conformity, Moscovici (1976) proposes that the main factor for minority influence lies in their consistency. That is, when minorities pose a clear and firm position on some issue and face the pressure exerted by the majority without changing their position.

However, consistency alone is not enough for minority influence to be relevant. Their effect also depends on how they are perceived by the majority and how they interpret their behavior.

The perception that what the minority stands for, even if it is appropriate and makes sense, takes longer to arrive than in the case of the majority compliance process. Furthermore, this influence has more effect when some member of the majority begins to respond as the minority.

For example, most of the children in a class play soccer and only three or four have a preference for basketball. If a soccer kid starts playing basketball, he will be better valued and little by little the others will also tend to play basketball.

This small change generates an effect known as "snowball", with which the minority is exerting more and more influence as confidence in the group itself decreases.

Influence of the majority VS influence of the minority

Moscovici also raises the differences between the effects of the majority and the minority in the field of modifying private opinion.

It suggests that, in the case of the majority, a process of social comparison is activated in which the subject compares their response with that of others and pays more attention to adjusting to their opinions and judgments rather than to the question posed itself..

Following this statement, this effect would only occur in the presence of the individuals who form the majority, returning to their initial belief once they are alone and this influence is removed.

However, in the case of minority influence, what takes place is a validation process. In other words, the behavior, belief and attitude of the minority group is understood and it ends up being shared.

In summary, the effect of social influence of the majorities occurs through submission, while the minority will cause the conversion of individuals.

Group decision making

The different studies carried out showed that the processes of influence when making group decisions are similar to those already treated in research on the influence of the majority and the minority.

In the influence given in small groups, two very interesting phenomena occur: group polarization and groupthink.

Group polarization

This phenomenon consists of an accentuation of the initially dominant position in a part of the group after a discussion. So the group judgment tends to move even closer to the pole to which the group average leaned from the beginning of the discussion.

Thus, two processes are involved in group polarization: the normative or social comparison perspective and the informational influence.

• Normative perspective: people need to evaluate our own opinions based on those of others and we want to give them a positive image. Thus, during a group discussion, the individual leans more in the direction of the most valued option, adopting a more extreme position in that direction in order to be better accepted by her group.
• Informational influence: group discussion generates various arguments. To the extent that these arguments coincide with those that the subjects already had in mind, they will reinforce his position. In addition, during the discussion it is likely that more opinions will emerge that had not occurred to the individual, causing an even more extreme position.

Group thinking

On the other hand, another existing phenomenon in group decision-making is groupthink, which can be considered as an extreme form of group polarization.

This phenomenon occurs when a group that is very cohesive focuses so much on the search for consensus when making decisions, that it deteriorates its perception of reality.

Something that characterizes groupthink is the exaggerated moral rectitude of the group's approaches and a homogeneous and stereotyped vision of those who do not belong to it.

Furthermore, according to Janis (1972), the groupthink process is reinforced when the following conditions are met in the group:

• The group is highly cohesive, very close.
• You are deprived of other alternative sources of information.
• The leader strongly supports a certain option.

Similarly, at the time of decision-making, there is a tendency to accept actions that are congruent with the assumed opinion, while discordant information is ignored or disqualified.

This censorship of opinions occurs both at the individual level (self-censorship) and among the members of the group (pressures for conformity), resulting in the decision taken at the group level not having any relation to the one that would be taken individually.

In this phenomenon of group decision-making, a series of illusions shared by the other members also appear, related to their perception of their own abilities to tackle problems:

• Illusion of invulnerability: It is the shared belief that nothing bad will happen to them as long as they stay together.
• Illusion of unanimity: consists of the tendency to overestimate the agreement that exists between the members of the group.
• Rationalization: these are the justifications made a posteriori, instead of analyzing the problems that affect the group.

Obedience and authority: the Milgram experiment

In the case of obedience to authority, the influence is totally different since the source of that influence has a status above the rest.

To study this phenomenon, Milgram (1974) carried out an experiment for which he recruited a series of volunteers to participate in an investigation, supposedly, of learning and memory.

The experimenter explained to the subjects that he wanted to see the effects of punishment on learning, so one of them would act as a teacher and another as a student, ignoring that the latter was an accomplice in the research.

Later, both, "teacher" and "student", went to a room where the "student" was tied to a chair and electrodes were placed on their wrists. On the other hand, the "professor" was taken to another room and explained that he should be shocked as punishment every time he gave wrong answers.

Once the task began, the accomplice made a series of errors to force the subject to deliver the shocks, which increased in intensity with each error.

Every time the subject doubted or refused to continue applying the punishment, the researcher invited him to continue with phrases such as: "please continue", "the experiment requires you to continue", "it is absolutely necessary that you continue" and "there is no alternative, you must continue."

The experiment was terminated when the subject, despite pressure from the researcher, refused to continue or when he had already applied three shocks with maximum intensity.

Conclusions of the experiment

When analyzing the results of his research, Milgram observed that 62.5% of the subjects managed to deliver shocks of the highest level. The authority of the scientist was sufficient for the subjects to suppress their conscience and the complaints of the accomplice and continue with the task, even though he never threatened them with any sanction.

To ensure that the subjects he worked with did not have sadistic tendencies, Milgram conducted a session in which he gave them to choose the maximum intensity of shock they wanted to apply, and these were almost three times less than the one they were forced to use.

Thus, from this experiment it was possible to extract different factors that influence obedience to authority by individuals:

Characteristics of authority

When the researcher delegated his authority to a second subject (also an accomplice), whose initial mission was simply to record the reaction time of the "student", the number of subjects who obeyed dropped considerably to 20%.

Physical proximity

When the subject could hear the complaints and screams of the accomplice or saw how he suffered, the rate of obedience was lower, especially when they were in the same room. That is, the more contact the "student" had with the subject, the more difficult it was to obey.

Peer behavior

When the subject was accompanied by two complicit "teachers" who refused to deliver the shocks at a certain level of intensity, only 10% were fully compliant. However, when the accomplices were those who administered the shocks without some kind of consideration, 92% of the subjects continued to the end.

References

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