[3] According to psychologist Bibb Latané, social impact is defined as any influence on individual feelings, thoughts or behaviors that is created from the real, implied or imagined presence or actions of others.
Solomon Asch's famous conformity experiments among college students challenged this psychosocial law by demonstrating that the presence of one or two sources of social influence had minimal effect.
This study supported the psychosocial law, finding that the initial confederates had the most significant impact on conformity.
Latané further applied the psychosocial law to imitation, referencing a Milgram experiment in which varying numbers of confederates stood on a New York City street corner looking up at the sky.
This law relates to diffusion of responsibility, in which individuals feel less accountable as the number of people present increases.
Ultimately, an individual's likelihood of change and being influenced is a direct function of strength (persuasiveness), immediacy and the number of advocates and is a direct inverse function of strength (supportiveness), immediacy and number of target individuals.
The dynamic social impact theory, as proposed by Bibb Latané and his colleagues, describes the influence of members between majority and minority groups.
Groups are constantly organizing and re-organizing into four basic patterns: consolidation, clustering, correlation, and continuing diversity.
Therefore, subgroups can emerge which may possess similar ideas to one another, but hold different beliefs than the majority population.
Continuing diversity - as mentioned previously, minority members are often shielded from majority influence due to clustering.
Mullen's results showed that the source strength and immediacy were only supported in cases in which tension was self-reported, and not when behavior was measured.
A study conducted by Constantine Sedikides and Jeffrey M. Jackson took another look at the role of strength and within social impact theory.
The results of the study showed that visitors responded better to the high-strength scenario, with fewer individuals leaning on the railing after the zookeeper had told them not to.
The results showed that immediacy played a role in determining social impact since there were fewer people leaning on the rails immediately after the message.
When compliance is simply a mechanism to induce the formation of a positive impression, stronger sources should produce a greater social impact.
This technique draws on external motivation because the request for a concession makes one feel obliged to comply.
Using the different persuasion approaches did not produce statistically significant results; however, it did support Williams and Williams hypothesis that the strength of the experimenter would heighten the effects of the door-in-the-face technique, but have minimal effect on the foot-in-the-door technique One study conducted by Helen Harton and colleagues examined the four patterns of dynamic social impact theory.
Ten questions were chosen from course-readings and either distributed as a hand-out, read aloud, or presented on an overhead projector.
Post-discussion, groups exhibited a significant degree of spatial clustering, as neighbors influenced each other to become more similar.
Researchers have since looked into the relationship between social media influence and visit and purchase intentions within individuals.
[7] Most recently, Rodrigo Perez-Vega, Kathryn Waite, and Kevin O'Gorman[8] suggest that the theory is also relevant in the context of social media.
Empirical research on this context has found support for the effects of numbers of sources (i.e. likes) in performance outcomes such as box office sales.
They compared the influence of using Twitter and discussion board in a learning management system (e.g., Moodle and Blackboard) on student performance, measured as final grade in a course.
Additional interesting insights were observed in this study that educators ought to consider to maximize the integration of new social technologies into pedagogy.