Social Influence

What is Social Influence?

Many factors influence how we interact with our environment, and social influence processes play a part in many different areas, including sales, marketing, peer pressure, socialisation, persuasion, obedience, and even large-scale political and social change.

Social influence comprises majority influence (conformity) and minority influence.

Majority influence is how a larger group influences an individual or smaller group. In psychology, most investigations into social influence deal with majority influence, as psychology focuses on the individual.

Minority influence is when an individual or smaller group influences a larger group. Although this has been studied in psychology, this type of large-scale social change is more the domain of sociology.

• Kelman’s Social Influence Theory (1958) introduces three types of social influence.

• Latané’s Social Impact Theory (1981); a very useful mathematical model for explaining social impact.

Kelman’s theory is older, so much more research up to date has been based on his theory. These two theories will be explored in more detail below.

What are the three different types of social influence in psychology?

Kelman describes three levels of depth of social influence; internalisation, identification, and compliance. Any of these three could be the outcome when a group puts pressure on an individual. You can imagine the three subtypes as a continuum of how much a person matches up with a group inside their mind and with their behaviour. On the lowest level, a person is separate from a group, and at the highest level, completely unified with a group.

What is compliance?

What does it mean to comply? What is compliant behavior and what are psychological factors of compliance?

Most marketing and sales aim to make customers comply with the business's request for the consumer to buy their products or use their services.

What is identification?

Our identification of ourselves and the world around us has great importance. How does identification affect us and those around us?

The process of identification most strongly determines socialisation, peer pressure and looking up to role models. Leaders or celebrities rely on identification – you might not like all aspects of a specific footballer’s life or demeanour but still put their poster up on your wall, maybe because you look up to them.

What is internalisation?

Internalisation is the deepest type of conformity. Here, the individual has completely taken on the expectations of the group, in private as well as in public. This change continues on indefinitely, even in the absence of the group. In essence, internalisation leads to new behaviour. The individual is now completely part of the group, in terms of thinking and behaviour.

What is obedience in psychology?

A good dog? A child who completes their school work? What is obedience? What is obedience within psychology?

Usually, these authority figures have the power to punish disobedience – they have legitimate authority. Depending on whether the individual is the one taking or giving the orders, they are either identifying with a role or complying with orders.

Milgram demonstrated that the circumstances (situational variables e.g. whether an authority figure wears a uniform) determined the likelihood of a person to obey. To explain his findings, he later developed his Agency Theory which states that to be effective, the authority must be legitimate.

What are majority and minority influences in psychology?

It is important to know what a majority or a minority influence is. How does this relate to the influences of psychology?

What is majority influence or conformity (normative and informational influence)?

In majority influence or conformity, the larger group influences the individual or smaller group. There are two explanations of why people conform: either they want to be accepted in a group (normative influence as investigated by Asch and Zimbardo), or they want to do what is correct informational influence as investigated by Sherif. Informational influence is more important in situations where there is no clear answer. Asch also found that group size, unanimity and task difficulty affect conformity.

Conformity does not have to be enforced with specific instructions like obedience. Rather it’s the sum of all the spoken and unspoken social norms and expectations that a person has to follow to be part of a group. Whether the internal world that leads to obedience is more one of compliance or identification is still a matter of debate (see Zimbardo in his Stanford Prison Experiment versus the BBC Prison Study.

There are also ways in which any social influence can be resisted. The two main factors determining if one can resist social influence are whether a person is supported or whether they feel in control of their own decisions.

What is minority influence?

In minority influence, the individual or smaller group influences the larger group and causes a change in the behaviour or thinking of the larger group. This social change is more likely to be permanent and internalised. The main factors that contribute to social change are consistency, the commitment of the minority group and flexibility of the majority group.

An example of minority influence leading to social change is the process by which suffragettes obtained the vote for women in the western world. At the time the suffragettes were founded, women couldn’t vote, have their own money, or even have custody over their own children. This often led to devastating abuses and miserable lives for women.

Feminism movement as an example of minority influence, Katarina Gadže, StudySmarter Originals (images from Canva)

In the beginning, the vote was fought for by small groups of women protesting their lack of say in government and in life by having sit-ins and demonstrations, being arrested and going on hunger strikes. But over time many men and women alike started to support their cause. The women's rights movement became a mass movement; resulting in the majority taking on the thinking of a few.

Nowadays, it’s normal for women to be able to vote and have a bank account. What started as a handful of women ended up leading to changes benefitting women in law and society that are still transforming society today.