Social influence
It takes many forms and can be seen in conformity, socialization, peer pressure, obedience, leadership, persuasion, sales, and marketing.
Typically social influence results from a specific action, command, or request, but people also alter their attitudes and behaviors in response to what they perceive others might do or think.
Informational influence comes into play when people are uncertain, either from stimuli being intrinsically ambiguous or because of social disagreement.
There are three processes of attitude change as defined by Harvard psychologist Herbert Kelman in a 1958 paper published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution.
[1] The purpose of defining these processes was to help determine the effects of social influence: for example, to separate public conformity (behavior) from private acceptance (personal belief).
[4] According to Kelman's 1958 paper, 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).
[1] Internalization is the process of acceptance of a set of norms established by people or groups that are influential to the individual.
[1] Conformity is a type of social influence involving a change in behavior, belief, or thinking to align with those of others or with normative standards.
[7] A self-fulfilling prophecy is a prediction that directly or indirectly causes itself to become true due to positive feedback between belief and behavior.
[11] Obedience is a form of social influence that derives from an authority figure, based on order or command.
US psychologist Robert Cialdini defined six "weapons of influence": reciprocity, commitment, social proof, authority, liking, and scarcity to bring about conformity by directed means.
[13] Psychological manipulation is a type of social influence that aims to change the behavior or perception of others through abusive, deceptive, or underhanded tactics.
[14] By advancing the interests of the manipulator, often at another's expense, such methods could be considered exploitative, abusive, devious, and deceptive.
The goal of the abuser is to control and intimidate the victim or to influence them to feel that they do not have an equal voice in the relationship.
[16] Political entities may employ patterns of similar techniques in the exertion of abusive power and control over persons subject to them.
[18] Hard power is the use of military and economic means to influence the behavior or interests of other political bodies.
For example, in Milgram's first set of obedience experiments, 65% of participants complied with fake authority figures to administer "maximum shocks" to a confederate.
Additionally, pressure to maintain one's reputation and not be viewed as fringe may increase the tendency to agree with the group.
[26] This has been attributed to Norway's longstanding tradition of social responsibility, compared to France's cultural focus on individualism.
For example, Christakis and Fowler found that social networks transmit states and behaviors such as obesity,[30] smoking,[31][32] drinking[33] and happiness.
[35][36][37] In order to address these flaws, causal inference methods have been proposed instead, to systematically disentangle social influence from other possible confounding causes when using observational data.
