Detailed
Contents and Chapter Outlines
Chapter
1. Social influence: Introduction and overview
Joseph P. Forgas and Kipling D. Williams,
University of New South Wales
This introductory chapter will set the scene for the book
by providing a brief historical overview of research on
social influence processes. The historical background and
origins of contemporary approaches will be traced to
groundbreaking work by classic social psychologists such
as Lewin, Festinger, Asch, Milgram and Tajfel, whose work
is reflected in several of the chapters here. This
chapter will also review recent developments in research
on social cognition and motivation that are relevant to
understanding both direct and indirect social influence
phenomena. The communalities between the various
theoretical formulations represented in the chapters of
this volume will be highlighted, and the prospects for a
comprehensive and integrated approach for understanding
social influence processes will be discussed.
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Part I - Social
influence: Fundamental
processes and theories
Chapter 2. Systematic
Opportunism: An approach to the study of tactical
social influence
Robert Cialdini, University
of Arizona
This chapter develops an integrative theoretical
approach to the investigation of a variety of
social influence phenomena that are
simultaneously systematic and opportunistic. The
social influence phenomena investigated via this
approach are invariably tactical in nature. These
phenomena extend over three domains of social
influence: persuasion (e.g., anticipatory
attitude and belief change, in which change
occurs before the receipt of a persuasive
appeal), self-presentation (e.g., basking in
reflected glory, in which attempts to influence
one's image in the eyes of others occur in an
indirect fashion), and behavioral change (e.g.,
compliance with the requests of another). The
chapter will describe empirical evidence
demonstrating the operation of these tactical and
opportunistic social influence effects, and an
integrative theoretical explanation for these
phenomena is proposed that emphasizes the role of
goals in the social influence process.
Chapter 3. Increasing
compliance by reducing resistance
Eric S. Knowles, University
of Arkansas
Social influence often creates an
approach-avoidance conflict for the recipient.
For instance, a request can establish a variety
of approach forces and also can create a variety
of avoidance forces. If the approach forces are
sufficiently strong, agreement follows. Most
theories of social influence focus on the
approach side of the social influence conflict.
Persuasion, marketing, attitude change, and other
theories of influence seek to bolster approach
tendencies. Few theories have focused on
diminishing resistance as an avenue for
increasing compliance. This chapter identifies
three social influence strategies concerned with
reducing resistance. The first strategy is to
redefine the social influence so as to avoid
activating resistance in the first place.
Relationship selling or redefining the
interaction as consultation are examples of this
strategy. The second strategy is to directly
attack resistance and focus on the persuasive
attempts on reducing resistance. A
money?back?guarantee adds no value to a product,
but undermines reasons for resisting a purchase.
A third strategy is to disrupt or distract
resistance so that it cannot contest the social
influence as in the author's research on the
Disrupt-then-Reframe technique. The chapter will
discuss the theoretical and applied implications
of these social influence techniques in areas
such as marketing, persuasion and attitude
change. The general importance of resistance
reduction will be emphasized and avenues for
further inquiry will be suggested.
Chapter 4. Simulating
Dynamic Social Impact: Three Levels of Prediction
Bibb Latané, Florida
Atlantic University, Martin J.
Bourgeois, University of Wyoming
The chapter takes as its point of departure
Latane's social impact theory, a theory of social
influence at the individual level. This model
assumes that behaviors, attitudes, moods, etc.
should vary as a function of the strength,
immediacy, and number of social influence
variables that determine the degree of social
impact in any given situation. Social impact
theory can account for a large body of
experimental research on conformity, compliance,
helping, obedience, and other phenomena. The
chapter will then describe how such an
individual-level theory of social influence can
be used to predict and explain group-level
influence phenomena. The dynamic social impact
theory relies on computer simulation to specify
what an individual-level theory predicts at the
group level. Computer simulations are described
allowing the derivation of group-level
explanations from the behavior of individuals,
manipulating social influence parameters such as
group size, minority size, etc. Results show for
example that just as in real groups, minorities
in simulations tend to be reduced in size,
opinions became spatially clustered, unrelated
opinions became correlated, and minorities tended
to survive. These simulations, based on a few
simple change rules, provide an amazing degree of
agreement to the levels of self-organization
found in actual groups. The theoretical
importance of this approach for our understanding
of social influence phenomena is discussed.
Chapter 5. Unintended
Influence: Social-Evolutionary Processes in the
Construction and Change of Culturally-Shared
Beliefs
Mark Schaller, University of
British Columbia
The reasons for the perseverance or disappearance
of social norms, attitudes and beliefs over time
represents a big question that transcends
psychology or any other single domain of inquiry.
Social influence strategies are critically
involved in this "social-evolutionary"
process, and they operate through the act of
communication. Social-evolutionary process refers
here to the way various elements of social
information (e.g., ideas, attitudes, fads and
fashions) are transmitted from individual to
individual, and may come to describe a population
of people. In one sense, attitudes, ideas and
other elements of social information can be
thought of as viruses. Just as the spread of a
virus requires social contact and influence,
beliefs and attitudes spread in a similar way.
The social influence is often unintentional and
outside awareness, as illustrated by Sherif's
studies of mutual influence in the formation of
social norms. The chapter describes a
comprehensive theory and a range of empirical
studies illustrating the operation of social
influence mechanisms in the creation, maintenance
and transmission of social shared beliefs and
attitudes.
Chapter 6. Automatic social
influence: The perception-behavior link as an
explanatory mechanism for behavior matching
Ap Dijksterhuis, University
of Nijmegen
The phenomenon of behavioral contagion or
behavior matching has intrigued many thinkers.
Many of us do tend to mimic the behavior of our
heroes, change our accents to match the different
accents of the people we are interacting with.
Our behavior is continuously and automatically
adjusted to bring it more in line with our social
environment. The goal of this chapter is to
review behavior matching findings and to argue
that all forms of behavioral matching - ranging
from matched facial expressions to matched
intellectual performance - can be explained by
one and the same psychological principle, namely
the principle that perception directly and
automatically affects overt behavior (the
"perception-behavior link"). The
chapter consists of three parts. First, it will
review some of the more important findings on
matching elementary behaviors such as facial
expressions, speech related variables, gestures
and postures. Secondly, the chapter will review
some recent findings on matching behavior that is
more complex and multifaceted. Finally, it will
be argued that these findings can be accounted
for by the same fundamental psychological
mechanism, the perception-behavior link.
Chapter 7. Social Power,
Influence, and Aggression
James T. Tedeschi, University
at Albany, State University of New York
The social psychological literature on aggression
has historically focused on biological and
learning processes. An alternative view is that
aggression is learned like any other behavior and
is a means to achieving goals. It is curious how
well segregated the literatures on aggression,
power and conflict, and criminal violence are.
This chapter develops a social interactionist
theory of coercive actions that integrates these
various approaches. The theory focuses on the
exercise of power and influence by an actor who
is motivated to achieve social goals. Among the
means of influence available to actors are
persuasion, promises, exhortation, pleas, offers,
rewards, warnings, threats, and punishments. The
goal of this paper is to show how a
power-oriented social interactionist theory can
explains most of the phenomena that have
pre-occupied aggression theorists. The paper is
organized into three parts. First,the basic
assumptions of a social interactionist
perspective are described. Second, based on a
critical analysis of the concept of aggression, a
common language is developed to bridge the areas
of aggression and coercive power and to identify
the phenomena that will circumscribe the scope of
the theory of coercive actions. Third, the basic
tenets of the theory are presented in terms of
motives for social control, to enhance social
identities, and to maintain justice.
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Part II - The role of cognitive
processes and strategies in social influences
Chapter 8. Subtle Influences
on Judgment and Behavior: Who is Most
Susceptible?
Richard E. Petty, Ohio State
University
Does more extensive thinking reduce or increase
social influence effects? Some research on
behavioral priming effects suggests that social
influence effects occur relatively automatically
under conditions of relatively low thought.
Similarly, work on judgmental assimilation
effects has indicated that a contaminating
context is most likely to produce judgmental
distortion for people who are low in their
chronic tendency to think. In contrast, this
chapter will review recent work by the author
which indicates that high thinking situations
frequently produce more contamination than low
thinking situations, and that thoughtful people
can be more susceptible to these contaminating
effects. For example, when individuals are primed
with the idea of "winning" or
"losing" a bet, a win prime led to
higher bets than a lose prime. However, this
effect was only apparent among the most
thoughtful individuals. In other studies, people
were induced to have high or low confidence in
their thoughts about a persuasive communication.
Under high elaboration conditions, this
manipulation paradoxically enhanced (or reduced)
the ability of thoughts to predict attitudes.
These studies are consistent with research
demonstrating that the contaminating role of
affect can also be greater under high than under
low thinking conditions (e.g., Forgas, 1995), and
provide a challenge to some recent theories that
assume that some mental contamination effects on
judgment and behavior are automatic and require
little cognitive effort. The chapter concludes
with a model of when high thinking is associated
with high and when it is associated with low
amounts of mental and behavioral contamination.
Chapter 9. Affect, cognition
and social influence strategies
Joseph P. Forgas, University
of New South Wales
Although recent research told us much about the
role of affect in how people think about and
process persuasive messages, the influence of
affective states on the generation of persuasive
messages has been far more neglected. This
chapter argues that even mild and temporary mood
states are likely to have a significant and
predictable influence on the quality as well as
the quality of the persuasive messages people
produce. Further, extrapolating from the author's
Affect Infusion Model (AIM; Forgas, 1995), the
chapter will develop a theoretical framework that
predicts that affective influences on persuasive
communication strategies are significantly
mediated by the cognitive, information processing
strategies that good and bad moods trigger.
Recent experiments from the author's laboratory
will be discussed showing that positive and
negative affective states significantly influence
the social influence strategies people adopt in
interpersonal situations. The evidence shows that
feeling bad and feeling good influence the kind
of influence strategies people adopt, the quality
and quantity of persuasive message, the way
interpersonal conflicts are handled, the way
people make requests and respond to requests, and
the way they engage in strategic interactions
that involve social influence strategies. The
chapter will conclude by emphasizing the critical
role of affect in how people use and interpret
social influence strategies, and the implications
of these findings for applied areas such as
organizational, clinical and marketing psychology
will be considered.
Chapter 10. Social influence
effects on memory
Herbert Bless, University of
Mannheim
The concept of social influence is often defined
as an effort on the part of one person to change
behaviors or attitudes of others. Whether it is
pressure towards conformity or to more subtle
techniques involved in changing behaviors and
attitudes, research has rarely looked at how such
influences impact on memory. The chapter analyzes
the role of social influence in recall and
recognition. Assuming that recognition is a
judgment, it follows that the same processes that
underlie social influence on attitude may also
affect recognition memory. Individuals should be
particularly susceptible to social influence if
they are not confident about their own judgment.
The chapter reports a series of experimental
studies showing strong social influence effects
on memory for non-salient details, but no social
influence effect was observed for salient
stimuli. In follow-up studies the Asch-type
conformity manipulation was used to influence
memory responses. Again, strong social influence
effects emerged that were more pronounced for
non-salient items. These results support the
contention that social influence may also affect
memory, especially when individuals feel
uncertain about the diagnosticity of the lack of
a recollective experience. The theoretical and
practical implications of these findings for
social influence and memory research will be
discussed.
Chapter 11. Influence
through the Power of Language
Sik Hung Ng, School of
Psychology, Victoria University of Wellington
Although language is not unique to humans, humans
are uniquely equipped to use language for
expressive, communicative, and strategic
purposes. The study of language use is strongly
wedded to a number of social psychological
topics. This paper addresses the topic of social
power, and reviews the concept of power with
reference to both "American" and
"European" social psychological
perspectives. The review covers field theory (and
the term "influence"), social exchange
theory, minority influence, and social identity
theory. The chapter then outlines a framework for
mapping five major links between power and
language. On the one hand, language can reveal
and reflect power, but has no power of its own.
On the other hand, individuals or group members
can use language to create influence, to
depoliticize (hide) their influence attempts, and
to routinize an existing dominance relationship
to make it seem natural. This Big Five framework
highlights the subtle, indirect, and perhaps
implicit aspects of influence through the power
of language. Finally, a number of experiments are
reported, and the chapter focuses on the social
psychological mechanisms whereby influence is
created through talk in conversational settings.
Chapter 12. Political versus
factual correctness: Social and cognitive
influences on human judgment
Fritz Strack, University of
Würzburg
In the domain of social judgment, people's
epistemic goals of factual accuracy and
procedural efficiency must be supplemented by the
goal to obey the social influences implicit in
current situational norms. Thus, both factual and
political correctness must be considered as goals
in the formation of judgments and be understood
in their regulating function. In this chapter,
judges' attempts to be both factually and
politically correct will be discussed with
respect to their social antecedents and their
underlying cognitive mechanisms. In particular,
it will be shown that in pursuit of these goals,
different types of judgmental correction will be
used. The implications of this analysis for our
understanding of many kinds of real-life social
influence processes will be emphasized.
Chapter 13. Stealing
thunder: A dissuasion tactic
Kipling Williams and Lara Dolnik,
University of New South Wales
A program of research is presented that
demonstrates the generality and limiting
conditions of a dissuasive tactic we call
stealing thunder-revealing negative information
first about oneself. By simply revealing first
damaging information about oneself (even without
putting a positive "spin" on it), the
net effect on peoples' judgments (i.e., their
verdicts, their intentions to vote; their
intentions to go out on a date) is that the
negative impact of that damaging information is
greatly reduced or eliminated. The chapter will
cover research in the various domains, as well as
some recently completed studies (within both
political and legal domains) that examine
boundary conditions for the effectiveness of this
social influence strategy.
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Part III - Social influence and
group behaviour
Chapter 14. Social Influence
and Stereotype Change
Charles B. Stangor and Gretchen B.
Sechrist, University of Maryland
A guiding principle in the field of social
psychology has been the powerful influence that
other people exert on an individual's beliefs,
attitudes, and behaviors. However, research on
the influence of other people's beliefs on an
individual's intergroup attitudes and behaviors
has received less attention within the field. The
purpose of the present chapter is to address the
impact of social influence literature on
intergroup beliefs and behavior. Past social
psychological research suggests that attitudes
change not so much through persuasive appeals
from others or even from direct experience, but
as a result of perceptions about the beliefs of
important ingroup members. Therefore, stereotypes
and prejudice could be the result, at least in
good part, of perceptions of ingroup norms. The
chapter reviews a range of existing theories and
research illustrating how such social influence
processes may operate. Experimental work by
Stangor, Sechrist, and colleagues are discussed
demonstrating the influence of consensus
information on intergroup beliefs and behavior.
The relevance of social influence mechanisms in
creating and maintaining stereotypes and
intergroup attitudes is emphasized throughout.
Chapter 15. Attitudes,
behavior, and social context: The role of norms
and group membership in social influence
processes
Deborah J. Terry and Michael A. Hogg,
University of Queensland
The role of social influence in explaining
attitude-inconsistent behaviours is still
incompletely understood. An individualistic
perspective on attitudes led to a limiting view
of attitude-behavior relations. This chapter will
argue that attitude-behavior consistency and
attitude change cannot be well understood without
reference to the wider social context of group
memberships. Attitudes themselves can be regarded
as social products influenced by social norms and
expectations. The paper offers a
re-conceptualization of attitude-behaviour
relations based on social identity and
self-categorization theories. The results of a
programmatic series of studies test the
prediction that attitude-behavior consistency
will be strengthened if a person's attitudes are
supported by a congruent ingroup norm. For
example, when the group is a salient basis for
self-conception, ingroup norms will influence
attitudes and attitude-behaviour relations. The
proposed reconceptualization of the role of norms
in attitude-behaviour relations should provide
some insight into the conditions under which
people are likely to bring their behaviour
towards outgroup members in line with their
intergroup attitudes, and hence has the potential
to improve our understanding of links between
prejudiced attitudes and discriminatory
behaviour.
Chapter 16. Social Influence
Effects on Task Performance: The Ascendancy of
Social Evaluation over Self-Evaluation
Stephen G. Harkins, Northeastern
University
The chapter describes a series of experiments by
Harkins and his colleagues, comparing social
evaluation as a source of social influence with
the potential for self-evaluation in motivating
task performance. Results show that when only
given "do your best" instructions,
participants are as motivated by the potential
for self-evaluation as they are by the potential
for evaluation by a social source, the
experimenter. However, when stringent goals are
set, social evaluation leads to better
performance than self-evaluation. Moreover,
irrespective of instructions, when both kinds of
evaluations are available, social evaluation
supersedes interest in self-evaluation.
Subsequent research has shown that social
evaluation supplants interest in self-evaluation
even when ego-involvement is increased. In
addition, the potential for evaluation by a
low-status coactor has the same effect as
evaluation by the experimenter. Taken together,
these findings demonstrate the potency of social
evaluation as a source of social influence and
call into question the central role that
self-evaluation is hypothesized to play in many
theories in social psychology.
Change 17.
Self-categorization and social influence: An
integrative, single-process account
Barbara David and John Turner, The
Australian National University
This paper outlines a three-part programme of
research concerned with the implications of
self-categorization theory for social influence
processes, and argues that these effects are
primarily a product of the nature of the social
relationship between source and target of
influence. The first issue addressed is whether
people, as conversion theory suggests, merely
comply with a source they perceive as similar to
themselves, or whether true influence, as
self-categorization theory predicts, is a product
of shared social identity. The second theme
proposes a self-categorization-based explanation
of the unique temporal patterning of minority
influence as being a product of changes in social
context. Finally the chapter addresses the
suggestion that majorities stimulate convergent
and minorities stimulate divergent thinking. The
chapter concludes that convergent and divergent
thinking are not the simple product of source
identity but of the complex relationships between
source, targets, and the nature of the message.
The implications of the programme of studies for
a theoretically cohesive approach to social
influence research are discussed.
Chapter 18. Determinants and
consequences of cognitive processes in majority
and minority influence
Robin Martin and Miles Hewstone,
Cardiff University, UK
This chapter reviews research evidence suggesting
that different cognitive processes underlie
majority and minority influence. The studies
suggest that the nature of that processing
depends on the processing demands that prevail
when the message is encountered. Taken together,
the findings underline an important change in the
questions we should ask about social influence.
We should no longer ask whether the majority or
minority can instigate systematic processing but
when either source does so. It seems that neither
the majority nor the minority can persuade all of
the people all of the time. Rather, it is
processing conditions that have that power. This
research, using a range of attitude topics,
suggests that systematic processing is the
default in the minority condition, but that
either source can, in principle and in practice,
trigger systematic processing.
Chapter 19. A SIDE view of
social influence
Russell Spears and Tom Postmes, University
of Amsterdam, Martin Lea, University
of Manchester
This presentation reviews a program of research
investigating social influence phenomena from the
perspective of the SIDE model (the Social
Identity model of Deindividuation Effects). This
model extends and develops self-categorization
explanations of social influence effects.
Self-categorization theory understands social
influence in terms of levels of self (person,
group) and how these relate to the influencing
source (Turner, 1991). SIDE extends this by
adding an analysis of contextual influences that
can impinge on the salient level of self (the
cognitive dimensions of SIDE), and the perceived
relation between self and influence source (the
strategic dimension of SIDE). Contextual factors
considered so far have focused primarily on
anonymity, identifiability, and isolation within
groups. This model has provided a heuristic
framework that has generated
often-counterintuitive predictions, such as
increased influence when the influencing source
is absent rather than present. It has been
successfully applied to the explanation of social
influence in crowds and a meta-analytic review of
this literature shows it to be a more powerful
explanation of deindividuation effects than
either classical or contemporary deindividuation
theory. SIDE has also been successfully applied
to the analysis of social influence in
computer-mediated communication (CMC), and the
presentation will review evidence from our
research program in this domain.
Chapter 20. Integration and
conclusions
Joseph P. Forgas and Kip Williams,
University of New South Wales
The last chapter will present an overview and
conceptual integration of the papers presented
here. The contributions within each of the three
sections of the book will be critically reviewed,
and integrative principles capable of linking
them will be highlighted. The chapter will also
discuss developments in related fields (such as
organisational and marketing psychology) that
have implications for our understanding of social
influence processes. Finally, the chapter will
discuss the specific implications of the work
presented here for a number of substantive areas
of research in psychology, and future prospects
will be outlined.
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