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• Social Influence refers to the efforts by people to change the attitudes, beliefs
or behaviours of other people. The aspects of Social Influence include:
Conformity, Compliance and Obedience
• Latané (1996) proposed the social impact theory which states that the
likelihood that a person will respond to social influence will increase with:
Strength (how important the influencing group of people are to you);
Immediacy (how close the group are to you in space and time); Number (how
many people there are in the group)
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Frienship/Liking, Commitment/Consistency, Scarcity, Reciprocity, Social
Validation and Authority.
• Social norms are rules and standards that are understood by members of a
group that guide/constrain social behaviour without the force of laws. They
emerge out of interaction with others, they may or may not be explicitly stated
and deviating from norms comes from ones social network not the legal
system
• Norms emerge from general societal expectations for our behaviour (Blake
and Davis, 1964; Pepitone, 1976), expectations of valued others for our
behaviour (Fishbein and Ajzen, 1975), our own expectations for our
behaviour (Schwartz, 1977), standards that develop from observing others
(Cialdini, Reno and Kallgren, 1990) .
• Two different norms govern how we allocate goods and services to our friends
and relatives, as opposed to strangers and acquaintances as illustrated by the
distributive justice norm. It states that for formal or short term partners
relationships are based on exchange principles whilst for intimate or long term
partners, relationships are more communal.
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• We engage in a variety of maneuvers in order to maintain a positive self-
concept. Some of these include: Self-serving attributional bias (Ross & Sicoly,
1979), False Consensus (Ross, Green & House, 1977), Self-handicapping
(Berglas & Jones, 1978), Social Comparisons (Wills, 1981). Schwartz (1977)
argues that we have personal norms or self-based standards that come from
our internalized values and they are self-reinforcing
Readings
Cialdini R.B., Trost M. R. (1998). Social Influence: Social Norms, Conformity,
and Compliance. In Gilbert, D. T., Fiske S.T., Lindzey G. (Eds), The handbook of
social psychology (pp 151-192). Oxford University Press.
Shamir, Jacob, & Shamir, Michal. (1997). Pluralistic ignorance across issues and
over time: Information cues and biases. The Public Opinion Quarterly, 61(2), pp
227-260.
Lewis, M. A., Neighbors, C., Lindgren, K. P., Buckingham, K.G., Hoang, M.,
(2009). Theories of social influence on adolescent and young adults alchohol use.
In K. T. Everly, & E. M. Cosell (Eds.) Social drinking: Uses, abuses and
psychological factors (pp. 1-39). Nova Science Publishers.