1
An Invitation to Social
Influence Research
ANTHONY R. PRATKANIS
Do you ever wonder why people do things? For example, why, all of a sudden, is everyone wearing the same purple shirt or the same hairstyle or using the same cool, groovy, or is it spot-on jargon to describe what they like and agree with? How can a group of people watch someone else commit acts of violence on another human being and not intervene? How can a person be urged on to commit such acts of violence in the first place? Why does a seemingly normal person give his or her money to a con criminal? What happens to get us to purchase things on the used car lot or the cosmetic counter or the infomercial, among other places? How can a leader of a nation move us to accomplish great things? What social forces cause groups and leaders to make brilliant decisions one minute, and bad choices with disastrous consequences the next? How does a small group (and sometimes just one person) come to change the behavior and folkways of an entire community, nation, or world? And, perhaps most importantly, how can we resist unwanted and undesirable social influence attempts?
If you find yourself pondering such things, then you have come to the right place. You wonder about the same things as the authors of the chapters of this book. The purpose of this book is to introduce you to the science of social influenceâ a science that addresses the issue of how and why people change the thoughts, feelings, and behavior of other people through such processes as conformity, persuasion and attitude change, compliance, and yielding to social forces. Our goal is to have you join us in this science of social influence and conduct your own research into the question of why and how we humans do what we do.
In this book, you will find chapters designed to introduce you to the literature of social influence. In each chapter, you will discover what sorts of research scientists have conducted on a social influence topic along with current theorizing and the next set of questions that remain to be answered. The book begins with two chapters that present a review of social influence tactics that scientists have studied to date. In Chapter 2, I review 107 different experimentally tested social influence tactics along with 18 techniques for increasing credibility and attraction. In Chapter 3, Eric Knowles and Dan Riner present their Omega approaches for overcoming resistance to influence. The next chapter (by Elliot Aronson) switches gears and looks at perhaps the single most important theory for generating novel predictions about social influence and for understanding its more counterintuitive natureâ cognitive dissonance theory.
The next set of three chapters looks at specific social influence tactics in detail, including the emotional see-saw (in Chapter 5 by Dariusz Dolinski), fleeting attraction (in Chapter 6 by Jerry Burger), and norms (in Chapter 7 by Noah Goldstein and Robert Cialdini). These chapters provide a tutorial on how to conduct a program of research to investigate social influence techniques. In Chapter 8, Paul Nail and Geoff MacDonald take a closer look at conformity processes by presenting their model for understanding social responses to group pressure. Chapter 9 continues the theme of group pressure as Marlene Turner, Christina Struckman, and I look at a classic conformity effectâ Janisâs groupthinkâ through a new lens of social identity maintenance. In Chapter 10, Carsten De Dreu reverses our perspective and addresses the issue of when the few (minority dissent) will change the beliefs and performance of the many. The process by which influence spreads in a community is the topic of Nicholas DiFonzo and Prashant Bordiaâs Chapter 11 as they develop a dynamic social impact theory of rumor. In Chapter 12, Rod Kramer addresses a novel area of social influence researchâ how do leaders think about influence and, more importantly, why do they fail to use power in an effective manner? Finally, Brad Sagarin and Sarah Wood close out the volume by reviewing the literature on when and how people resist influence.
The chapters in this volume provide a great introduction to recent research on social influence. The goal of the present chapter is to complete this introduction by providing a broad overview of the tools you need to get started as a social influence researcher. Specifically, I will review the history of research on social influence, look at the nature of explanation in social influence research along with research methods and strategies, and then describe how you can find out more about this topic.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF SOCIAL INFLUENCE
RESEARCH, 1895â1984
Although humans have always pondered why they do things, we can date the birth of the scientific exploration of social influence to two events in the late 19th century. In 1895 Gustave Le Bon published Psychologie des foules, which is often translated as The crowd. In this book, Le Bon provides a theory of behavior in groups based on the concept of a group mindâ that individuals placed within the anonymity and invincibility of a crowd would display their unconscious personality and merge with the group to perform savage behaviors. The metaphor for Le Bonâs theory was hypnosisâ the notion that the crowd took over the will of the person much like the suggestions of a hypnotist command the unconscious of the hypnotized. Le Bon wasnât the first to promote these ideas (indeed, he âborrowedâ heavily from the Italian Scipio Sighele), but his popularization of the concept of group mind provided a theoretical framework used before the First World War for elucidating social influence as well as serving as a foil for later research (see van Ginneken, 1992; McPhail, 1991 for excellent histories of this idea).
The second major event of this period was the first experiment to investigate social influence processes. In 1898 Norman Triplett published an article looking at archival data on the performance of bicyclists in groups and alone. He then conducted an experiment manipulating the presence of others, and showed that when other people were watching an individual would turn a fishing crank faster. Triplettâs work opened up a line of research on social facilitation but perhaps more importantly introduced the experimental method as a viable means to study influence.
The First World War changed the trajectory of social influence research. In the United States and Britain, the war was marked by a period of patriotism; after the war, many citizens became disillusioned by the results and came to feel that they had been duped by propaganda. The Zeitgeist of the times encouraged the belief that social influence and mass propaganda was all-powerful (based on either suggestion theories from psychoanalysis or behaviorismâs belief in malleable human behavior). Researchers and scholars began documenting this belief as well as attempting to find ways to inoculate citizens from propaganda. Social influence research during the interwar period featured (a) case and descriptive analyses of propaganda, particularly war propaganda (e.g., Lasswell, 1927) and the influence of demagogues (e.g., Lee, 1939), (b) use of the experimental method to document that âpersuasionâ happens, (c) the development of survey research procedures and techniques to measure attitudes by L. L. Thurstone and others (to assess the state of society as it responds to propaganda), and (d) field studies of the effects of mass media such as the Payne Studies. In the 1930s, a group of scholars formed the Institute for Propaganda Analysis with the expressed goal of teaching Americans about propaganda (see Chapter 13 of this volume for a modern equivalent). Running counter to this trend was the investigation of the use of influence among those who needed to be able to persuade others. Specifically, research on advertising during this time was marked by the use of learning theory to understand how to improve the effectiveness of an ad, and research on influence in organizations saw the rise of self-help books providing leaders with tips on how to persuade (e.g., Webb & Morgan, 1930).
Two experiments conducted during the interwar period would later have enormous impact on the course of social influence research. In 1935, Muzafer Sherif published the results of his doctoral dissertation in which groups of people judged the autokinetic effect (an illusion that a light moves when placed against a dark background). His results showed that groups quickly developed norms for making these judgments and that these norms would guide subsequent judgments. His research was significant because it (a) provided one of the two major alternative theories to the group mind in terms of emergent norms (the other major alternative was Floyd Allportâs response amplification theory) and (b) created major lines of research on norms (such as Newcombâs 1943 Bennington studies; see Chapter 7 of this volume) and on the power of the situation (see Chapter 8 of this volume).
In 1939, Kurt Lewinâ a recent immigrant to the United States as a result of fleeing the Nazi regimeâ along with his students Lippitt and White began publishing their work on the effects of democracy and autocracy (summarized in White & Lippitt, 1960). The results showed that democratic leadership resulted in more creative productivity than autocratic regimes, among other findings. The experiments are significant for a number of reasons, including demonstrating (a) that the experimental method can be applied to complex social influence phenomena, and (b) the fruitfulness of field theory (how people construe their social world and the resulting tension states) as a meta-theory for producing research hypotheses. Perhaps more significantly, Kurt Lewin would go on to train the first generation of experimentalists looking directly at social influence processes.
Like the First World War, the Second World War changed the trajectory of social influence research. As part of the war effort many scholars became deeply involved in social influence research, including Carl Hovlandâs work on mass communications, Kurt Lewinâs research on changing food habits, Irving Janisâs study of the stress effects of air bombing (Janis would later introduce the term âgroupthinkâ), Leonard Doobâs study of Nazi propaganda, and Gordon Allport and Leo Postmanâs research on controlling rumors. After the war, these researchers returned to their universities and began (along with their students) to study social influence phenomena such as conformity, mass communications, prejudice, power, and obedience to authority that had been at the heart of the war. The result was a flourishing of exciting social influence research from a variety of perspectives and on a range of topics. I shall briefly summarize six areas of research that capture the nature of research during the post-war period.
1. Mass communications. After the Second World War, two lines of research converged to challenge the view of âall-powerful propaganda of the mass mediaâ popular during the interwar period (see Pratkanis, 1997 for more details). At Yale University, Carl Hovland conducted a program of experimental research (known as the Yale School) investigating the effects of various variables (e.g., source credibility, individual differences, organization of the message) on persuasion. The results, published in a series of monographs, showed weak effects of these variables on social influence. Survey researchers were finding similar minimum effects. For example, in The peopleâs choice, Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet (1948) found that during the 1940 Presidential campaign few voters changed their voting preferences as a result of mass media content. The resulting model of influence was termed âminimum effectsâ and posited that persuasion was the result of a series of steps (attention to the message, comprehension, learning, yielding, and behavior), each with a decreasing probability of occurring. A summary of this research can be found...
