What are the Different Forms of Social Influence - Essay Example

What are the different forms of social influence? How have psychologists studied them? Introduction Social influence is a phenomenon which occurs when a person’s opinions, behaviours or emotions are influenced by other people. It is important to study social influence because the decisions we make in our daily lives are influenced by other people surrounding us, the people may be family, friends or all other people in the world whom one does not know personally. Consequently the decisions of other people also affect and influence us (Myers 2012, p.1), there are three broad categories of social influence namely; compliance, internalization and identification. Compliance refers to a positive and submissive reaction or response to an implicit request which can be made through advertising or an explicit request which can be made through a foot-in-the-door technique. The person, to whom request is being made to, may not necessarily know that the request is meant to influence his/her behaviour or attitude. Identification is a phenomenon where a person’ opinion, attributes and behaviour about an attribute, property or an aspect changes and the person partially or fully transforms, due to the influence of someone who he/she likes. Identification involves a psychological process which has a sequence of identifications that are specified and constituted by the person who is liked. Identification type of social influence emanates from the concepts of primary identification, secondary education/ narcissism and partial secondary identification (Freud 1993, p.109). Internalization is a type of social influence phenomenon where a person publically or privately accepts a set of norms which affect him/her and were established by individual people or groups. The three types of social influence can take different forms such as conformity, leadership, socialization, persuasion, obedience and peer pressure (Goethals and Sorenson 2006, p.107). This essay discusses examples of forms of social influence, looks at ways which psychologists have studied the forms of social influence and discuss rationale of social influence and social psychology. Conformity is considered to be the most common form of social influence and it involves a change in a person’s belief, line of thinking or behaviour with the goal of fitting in or aligning one’s self with generally accepted normative standards. There are two variants of conformity namely; normative conformity and social proof/ informational conformity. Informational conformity shares the concepts of internalization type of social influence. A case example of conformity is seen in a case where a person agrees to drink alcohol due to peer pressure so that he/ she may keep may maintain positive relationship with his/her peers (Cialdini and Goldstein 2004, p.606). Minority influence is another form of social influence where a majority group in a certain situation accepts or conforms to the influence of a minority group because of situational factors such as the affluence or social importance of the minority group. Self- fulfilling prophecy is forms of social influence which involves a person making a prediction that may become true either directly or indirectly basing on the positive behavioural and belief feedback that it receives. A prediction which is claimed to be true even if it is not may significantly influence people by inducing fear or confusion so that their response conforms to the false prediction. Reactance is a form of social influence that depict the conformity of a person to a contrary view or an aspect other that the one that he/she is being pressurized to take by the influencer, for the fear of threat on his/her behavioural freedoms. The reaction is contrary to the expectations of the influencer and it occurs due to social pressure. Obedience, which can also be referred to as human behaviour is a form of social influence which originates from an authority figure who can be a policeman, prison guard or another person’s in authority at a particular institution. Persuasion is a form of social influence which involves a process where a person guides himself/herself or another person into acceptance and following of an aspect, attitude or behaviour because of its symbolic meaning and rationale. There are various factors that can affect the degree and measure of success of social influence. According to the social impact theory developed by BibbLatané in 1981, the significance or purpose of influencing a certain group of people by an individual (influencer), proximity of the influencer to the target group determines the strength of social influence (Bordens and Horowitz 2001, p.252). Robert Cialdini explains methods that one can use to enhance the influence he/ she desires on a target individual or group in his work (Cialdini and Goldstein 2004). He termed these methods as “weapons of influence”, and they include reciprocity, which is a concept which dictates that people sometimes tend to reciprocate a favour offered to them. Social proof explains the concept that people are more susceptible to do things when they see other people do them. Commitment and consistency; which explains that people avoid being self-contradictory. Authority is a concept that explains people’s obedience to authority while liking is a concept that explains why people choose things which they like. In addition, scarcity is a concept that explains that inadequacy of resources leads to increased demand. In a general sense, social influence strength depends mostly on the commitment and consistency of the group targeted for influence (Baumeister and Bushman 2008, p.298). Psychology attempts to explain the aspects of why people think and behave the way they do; while social psychology is the examination of how individual’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviours are affected by the real, imaginary, or implied existence of other people (Bernstein and Bouas-Henry 2011, p.39). The goal of social psychology is to understand and explain various aspects of social behaviour. Psychologists have conducted various studies in order to answer questions relating to the issue of social influence by studying the concept of social psychology (Forgas and Williams 2001, p.26) The studies involve testing of different theories either in laboratories or in the field. The tests are carried using the following methods: experimental, correlational and observational methods. Experimental method requires a researcher to alter a variable in the environment and measure the effect of the alteration on another variable. An example of this is; allowing two groups of student, one being violent and another non-violent to play football and observe their levels of aggression during the play time. Correlational method of testing requires a researcher to examine and analyse statistical relationship between variables that occur naturally. For example one could examine the relationship between the amounts of violent programmes students watch on television with the number of violent incidents the students participate in when in school (Myers 2012, p.21). Observational method requires that a researcher naturally observes target study sample. An example of this study is watching students play football in a field while recording violent incidents throughout the play time. Researchers mostly use experimental methods whenever it is possible. They mostly use samples from a population in their research because it is difficult to use the whole population due to the large number of people. Famous experiments carried out in the course of social psychology researches include the Ash conformity experiment, which was carried out to show the power of conformity in small groups with a simple line estimation task. On about a third proportion of the experiment trials, participants accepted the majority answer though it was wrong (Andersen and Taylor 2006, p.146). Another experiment is the Muzafer Sherif’s Robber’s experiment where boys were divided into two groups to see how violence and aggression would occur. The inter-group conflict between the two groups was brought about by competition for resources (Sherif 1988, p.4). Conclusion A small number of people prefer living a lonely or solitary life which provides minimal contact with other people while most people prefer living around and in close contact with other people. In the world we live in today our behaviour and life decisions dealing with various aspects of our lives, affects and influences other people to make their decisions and their decisions consequently influences our decisions. For example, when we don’t like the behaviour of another person we make a point of not imitating the behaviour but when we like the behaviour of another person we make a point of imitating the behaviour. This example which a form of social influence, ascertains the notion that social influence plays an important role in creating and developing order, especially behavioural order and stability in a society. References Andersen, M. and Taylor, H., 2006. Sociology. Belmont, CA: Thomson/Wadsworth. Baumeister, R. and Bushman, B., 2008. Social psychology and human nature. Belmont, CA: Thomson Higher Education. Bernstein, D. and Bouas-Henry, K., 2011. Essentials of psychology. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Pub Co. Bordens, K. and Horowitz, I., 2001. Social psychology. Mahwah, N.J.: L. Erlbaum. Cialdini, R. and Goldstein, N., 2004. Social Influence: Compliance and Conformity. Annu. Rev. Psychol., 55(1), pp.591-621. Forgas, J. and Williams, K., 2001. Social influence. Philadelphia: Psychology Press. Freud, A., 1993. The ego and the mechanisms of defence. London: Karnac Books. Goethals, G. and Sorenson, G., 2006. The quest for a general theory of leadership. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Myers, D.G., 2012. Psychology. London: Worth Publishers Sherif, M., 1988. The Robbers Cave experiment. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press. Read More