Social Influence
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Social Influence is the study of how people persuade and are persuaded. It is of special influence to people in marketing or politics who seek to convince people of the benefits of an item or policy. People are cognitive mizers, especially in a world full of more and more information, and so it makes sense that they take shortcuts to decide on the merits of any given item. Below are explanations of some of these shortcuts.
Also see Group Influence
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Types in Social Influence
The initial conceptualization of these headings owes much to the work of Robert Cialdini and his book, Influence, The Psychology of Persuasion. Also see RB Cialdini, NJ Goldstein - Annual Review of Psychology, 2004.
Reciprocation
I think it was one of Malcolm Gladwell's books which talked about the way that the Hari Krishna movement grew so extensively. Specifically, they hit upon the influence technique of reciprocation whereby they would give a 'gift' of a flower to any passerby at the airport. We are so driven by the principle of reciprocity that despite our better judgement, we feel obligated to return the favor and give a contribution.
There are lots of empirical studies which confirm this phenomenon. There is a domain specific bias towards reciprocity which perhaps aided human development by increasing cooperation (T Kiyonari, S Tanida, T Yamagishi - Evolution and Human Behavior, 2000).
Commitment
Telling people you are going to do something makes you more likely to follow through. For example, Greenwald, Carnot, Beach, and Young (1987) found that more people voted when they had previously been asked if they were going to vote. Some people call this the "Self Prophecy Effect".
Popularity (ie. Social Norms or Social Proof)
I saw Cialdini speak on influence at SPSP and he mentioned 2 examples that stuck with me.
- The IRS was seeking to reduce the amount of tax fraud and announced that it was such a pervasive problem that they were going to crack down. The result of their announcement? More people committed tax fraud!
- A national park was having trouble with people stealing petrified wood, so they put up a sign saying that so much wood was being stolen that it was threatening the environment. The result? More wood is stolen!
Social norms are what we learn from watching other people as opposed to what people tell us to do. We tend to do what we see others do rather than what we are told to do. In the above 2 cases, the message that people got was that other people were doing these things too, so it's not so bad if I do it too.
In an empirical study, Cialdini tested social vs. injunctive (what we are told to do) norms. People who encountered a flyer on their car windshield were more likely to litter when given a social norm (ie. a clean parking garage) than when given an injunctive norm (ie. a sign telling them not to litter). Cialdini, Reno, & Kallgren, 1990
Liking
People we like have more influence over us than people we do not like. As such, anything positively correlated with liking (ie. similarity, familiarity, etc...) is also positively correlated with influence.
Authority
The most obvious experiments which show the influence of authority on situations are the Millgram experiments. There is a wonderful wikipedia entry on it -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment. Scary stuff.
Scarcity
We value that which is scarce (ie. Gold or insider trading information).
