SOCIAL INFLUENCE Unlike implicit expectations, explicit

expectations are clearly and formally

Core Questions
stated— not at all subtle. There are also
1. What types of social influence exist? two forms of explicit expectations:
compliance and obedience.
2. Why and when do we choose to conform?
 Compliance occurs when you
3. How do social roles change our behavior?
behave in response to a direct or
4. What can we learn from Milgram’s indirect request. When healthy
experiments on authority? graduate students asked people
on a New York City subway to
give up their seat, about two
WHAT TYPES OF SOCIAL INFLUENCE thirds of the subway riders
EXIST? complied (Milgram & Sabini,
1983)— just because someone
Social influence describes how our thoughts,
asked. With compliance, there
feelings, and behaviors respond to our social
isn’t necessarily any threat of
world, including our tendencies to conform to
punishment for not doing the
others, follow social rules, and obey authority
behavior—it is a request, not a
figures. Social influence takes two basic forms:
demand.
implicit expectations and explicit expectations.
 In contrast, obedience occurs
Implicit expectations are unspoken rules. Like when you behave in a particular
the unwritten laws of middle school, implicit way because someone of higher
expectations are enforced by group norms. For status has ordered you to do so.
example, no one has to tell you that you will It might be your boss at work, a
likely be expected to dress differently at formal parent, or a professor at school;
religious events compared to attending a retro in any case, the expectation is
grunge rock concert. Implicit expectations can stated clearly and often
be further subdivided into two types. accompanied by some kind of
social punishment if you fail to
 The first is conformity, which occurs
obey. In general, obedience can
when you voluntarily change your
be considered a more extreme
behavior to imitate the behavior of your
version of compliance.
peers.
 A second form of implicit social influence SOCIAL NORMS AND THE HERD
comes from social roles, or MENTALITY
expectations from a group about how
 Social norms (also called group norms)
certain people are supposed to look and
—rules that indicate how people are
behave. We share stereotypes about
expected to behave in particular social
how elementary school teachers, rock
situations. There is an implied payoff for
musicians, clergy, and presidential
conforming to social norms for humans,
candidates publicly engage with others.
as well as many other species. It
These expectations are implicit because
increases our odds of meeting, mating,
while everyone knows the “rules,” they
and protecting our offspring until they
aren’t necessarily written down or
reach their own reproductive maturity
formalized.
(Buss & Kenrick, 1998). Put another
 way, however, the reverse is also true: If mere existence of the crowd justified
we fail to meet social norms, our conforming to it. Perhaps people felt
chances of being accepted by the group pressure to fit in; perhaps they wanted
decrease—and our stubborn to find out what was so interesting to
independence reduces our chances of everyone else. It was a reasonable
finding a life partner. assumption by the passersby that there
 Group norms can also create a herd must be something up in that window
mentality (the tendency to blindly follow worth looking at. Either way, the
the direction your group is moving experiment demonstrated something
toward). Suddenly you may find yourself that might not be unique to the streets of
proclaiming strange and dangerous New York City. When more people
beliefs. “Going along to get along” engage in a particular behavior, others
can also lead to authoritarian leaders, will feel more pressure to follow along.
and a herd mentality can make small
• Mass Psychogenic Illness. About 15
conflicts mushroom into dangerous
minutes after arriving at Warren County
confrontations. For example, prior to
High School in Tennessee, a teacher
World War I, both sides recruited many
noticed a “gasoline-like” smell in her
thousands of enthusiastic volunteers.
classroom. She was about to trigger a
Both sides were certain that the conflict
disturbing form of social contagion
would be short and glorious. This war
called mass psychogenic illness, socially
wasn’t short and it wasn’t glorious. The
contagious physical symptoms with no
herd mentality helped recruit and then
physical cause. The high school teacher
destroy almost an entire generation.
soon developed a headache, nausea,
shortness of breath, and dizziness. The
school was evacuated, and 80 students
CONFORMING IS CONTAGIOUS
and 19 staff members went to the
• Social Contagion. One of social emergency room, resulting in 38
psychology’s simplest yet strangest hospitalizations (Jones et al., 2000).
experiments demonstrates the
• The school reopened 5 days later, but
importance of group size in social
the “epidemic” was not over; 71 more
contagion, the spontaneous distribution
people went to the emergency room
of ideas, attitudes, and behaviors
even though extensive testing could find
among larger groups of people. One
no physical cause or evidence of toxic
person on a busy New York City street
compounds. Researchers eventually
stopped on the sidewalk and stared up
noticed that the strange symptoms were
at a sixthfloor window of a building
communicated through “line of sight.”
(Milgram, Bickman, & Berkowitz, 1969).
Simply seeing someone whom you
That’s all it took to start a small social
believed was ill could trigger
contagion. Make no mistake: There was
hyperventilation. Rashes, none of which
nothing special in the window—just
suggested exposure to a toxic
some distant, difficult-to-see people
substance, appeared to be caused by
looking back at them.
scratching. Despite being caused by
• Here’s the apparent take-home purely psychological factors relating to
message from this odd experiment: The
 social conformity, the Tennessee • Imagine going to an unfamiliar religious
“outbreak” involved ceremony with a friend. A little nervous,
you start looking around to see how
• The Tanganyikan Laughter Epidemic.
other people are acting. If they take off
Social contagion also explains why
their shoes, you will probably do the
television laugh tracks are effective: We
same. If they kneel or sit or stand, again,
tend to mimic one another when we
it’s likely that you will follow along. Most
hear laughter (Provine, 1992) and then
of us perform these actions because we
conclude that we must find something
both
funny about the situation (Neumann &
Strack, 2000). An extreme version of • (1) are uncertain about what the correct
this form of social contagion was the behavior is and
“Tanganyikan Laughter Epidemic.”
• (2) have anxiety about fitting in.
Three girls attending a small,
missionary-run boarding school in what • These two concerns help explain that
is now Tanzania started laughing. the theory of informational and
Strangely, the laughter quickly spread to normative influence describes two
the other students and was ways that social norms cause
accompanied by fainting, a rash, conformity: informational conformity and
unexplained pain, and occasional normative conformity (Deutsch &
screaming. The teachers never “caught” Gerard, 1955, 1972).
the laughing disease, but when it
• This time, imagine you’re in a history
eventually affected 95 of the 159
class and the professor asks if you
students, the school had to be closed.
remember the capital city of Switzerland.
Your first thought is “Geneva,” but
someone else in the class speaks first
THE MAIN IDEAS
and answers, “Bern.” You then notice
1. Social influence can be either implicit that several other students nod and
(including conformity and behaving according seem to agree. Most people in this
to a social role) or explicit (including situation would start to doubt
compliance and obedience). themselves—was I wrong? What’s the
correct answer? Would you pull out your
2. Informal social norms (also called group
phone and double check? The
norms) are communicated through a process
frequency of searching for quick
called social contagion and can lead to a herd
information through phone web
mentality.
browsers highlights how often we are
3. One extreme form of social contagion or uncertain about everyday information.
conformity is mass psychogenic illness. Muzafer Sherif (1936) wanted to find out
how informational uncertainty influences
people in situations when we can’t
check somewhere for the answer. His
studies pioneered research on
informational social influence,
WHY AND WHEN DO WE CHOOSE TO voluntarily conforming to group
CONFORM?
 standards when we are uncertain about estimate of 15 inches. And when the
the correct answer or behavior. confederate in a third experimental
group started with an estimate of only 2
inches, estimates from the real
WHY WE’RE TEMPTED BY participants conformed around this
INFORMATIONAL SOCIAL INFLUENCE much smaller number. Remember that
the idea behind control groups and
• Public and Private Conformity.
experimental groups is to provide
Admitting to uncertainty can be
meaningful comparisons by keeping
disturbing, but it doesn’t have to be.
everything the same except for the
Instead, it can be helpful to understand
variable of interest (the independent
the connection between conformity and
variable). In this experiment, the only
the uncertainty that we experience in the
thing that changed was the
absence of cultural hints or social
confederate’s declaration of how far the
norms. Under conditions of uncertainty,
dot of light had moved— and the
we tend to grab at anything, any tidbit of
experiment tested how that initial
information that tells us how to behave.
number caused participants’ answers to
SHERIF AND THE AUTO-KINETIC EFFECT- change for their own estimates (the
EXPERIMENT dependent variable). Why did the
experimental group participants conform
• To study the auto-kinentic effect, Sherif
around 15 inches and 2 inches? Social
created a controlled experiment by first
psychologists say the answer is
placing participants in a darkened room
informational social influence that occurs
and then having them look at a dot of
when we are uncertain about what is
light (Sherif, 1935, 1936). Sure enough,
correct.
the dot of light seemed to dance about
in the darkness. Individual people in the • Generational Influence on Conformity.
control group of the experiment—who Several years later, two researchers at
were tested by themselves without Northwestern University followed the
others to influence them—estimated that thread of Sherif’s auto-kinetic
the light had moved an average of 4 experiments to an additional discovery.
inches; this estimate became the This study (Jacobs & Campbell, 1961)
baseline for later comparisons. Of demonstrated a generational influence,
course, the reality was that the dot of a cultural belief or norm that transcends
light had not moved at all. In the control the replacement of people. Thinking of a
group, people simply gave their best generation as the replacement of
guess. Next, Sherif arranged for a persons rather than as generations
confederate in the experimental group to based on birth, life, and death within a
provide a fake estimate of how far the family gave Jacobs and Campbell a way
light had moved. Sherif told the to study generational transfer without
confederate to estimate that the light having to wait for 40 or 50 years.
had moved about 15 inches. The
confederate did this out loud, so that
others in the room could hear the NORMATIVE SOCIAL INFLUENCE
estimate. Soon, everyone else was
conforming around the confederate’s
 • There are two types of norms. However, social pressures to conform
Descriptive norms refer to what is are subtle as well as powerful. In the midst of
commonly done, that is, what most the social turmoil of the 1960s, Birney, Burdick,
people do. Injunctive norms refer to and Teevan (1969) suggested that the cultural
what is socially sanctioned, that is, what revolution of the 1960s was itself an exercise in
society says people are supposed to do. ironic conformity. It seemed as if everybody
The distinction between the two types of was buying bell-bottomed pants, wearing
norms is apparent when you think about peace medallions, marching against the war in
littering. You’re not supposed to litter Vietnam, and smoking pot. Nonconforming had
(the injunctive norm), but in certain become the thing to do; all the
areas, littering is so common that many “nonconformists” started to look and act the
people will do it anyway, partly because same. It is, of course, an ironic observation
everyone else is littering (the descriptive about 1960s “hippies.” They were more likely
norm; see Cialdini, Kallgren, & Reno, to be cultural rebels if their culture
1991). It’s not easy to resist the power of communicated that it was okay to be a rebel.
social norms. We may privately disagree
More recently, young people have
with the group’s decision or behaviors,
chosen other ways to “rebel” as
but we still give in to the publicly
“nonconformists”; for example, some people
expressed social norms.
choose to embrace “Goth” culture by dressing
CULTURAL VALUES AND CONFORMITY in black and wearing specific types of jewelry.
Again, however, while the people participating
• Conformity, Culture, and Eating.
in this subculture highly value nonconformity,
Chandra (1973) found high rates of
the unwritten rules of how to fit in ironically
confor - mity in a replication of the line
mean that many “Goth” youths all look alike,
judgment experiment (about 58%) done
profess to enjoying the same types of music,
in Fiji. The participants in those studies
and so on.
were primary school teachers and
teachers-in-training. Fiji is a culture in HOW DO SOCIAL ROLES CHANGE OUR
which social conformity is highly valued. BEHAVIOR?
Amir (1984) found approximately the
• One of our students provided an
same rates of conformity in a replication
informal definition of social roles to a
done in Kuwait that Asch found in the
student she was tutoring. A social role is
United States. If culture can change the
“knowing what to do when you wake up
likelihood of people saying the wrong
in the morning.” It’s a pretty good
answer—even when they know it’s
definition. It hints at how just having a
wrong—can it affect other types of
social role helps resolve personal
confor - mity as well?
uncertainties by supporting a sense of
self. Social roles tell us how to act (think,
feel, and behave) in a variety of
situations. The studies in this section
explore the surprising power of social
roles. They demonstrate how profoundly
the mere suggestion of a social role can
IRONIC CONFORMITY: HIPPIES AND GOTH influence our behavior—especially
under conditions of uncertainty.
 and may feel that they will be able to act
with more anonymity.
ANONYMITY, DEINDIVIDUATION, AND
DISINHIBITION • Disinhibition. Lack of restraint
manifested in disregard of social
• In a simple but telling field study using
conventions, impulsivity, and poor risk
naturalistic observation, Diener and
assessment.
colleagues (Diener, Fraser, Beaman, &
Kelem, 1976) explored the process of • The simple observation that anonymity
deindividuation; they tested more than encourages deindividuation gains more
1,300 children approaching 27 different importance when you consider social
homes in Seattle during Halloween. media. The Internet provides many more
Researchers hid while trick-or-treaters opportunities for the kind of anonymity
were given the opportunity to steal that decreases self-awareness and
candy and money from a home they leads to deindividuation. “Trolling”
visited. They found that children were online, for example, allows people to
more likely to steal when anonymously write unpopular and
offensive beliefs without fear of having it
• (1) they were in a group (and thus might
reflect badly on themselves (Bargh &
not be individually held responsible),
McKenna, 2004; Steinfeldt et al., 2010).
and
• But hold on! Is social disinhibition
• (2) they had not been asked for their
always a bad thing? A temporarily
names by the person greeting them at
disappearing self might feel like a
the door.
vacation to some people. For example,
• Of course, being in a Halloween do you necessarily start harming others
costume probably also helped provide a when you cut loose at a concert, yell at
sense of anonymity. Without random the television in the privacy of your
assignment and a control group of home, or loudly complain about a
children not in costume, this conclusion referee within the safety of a crowd of
can only be speculation. Nevertheless, fans at a football or hockey game?
the evidence points to a provocative
conclusion: Anonymity encourages
deindividuation. THE PATH TO DISOBEDIENCE
• Anonymity. Lack of outstanding, • Private inner doubt
individual, or unusual features;
• Public expression of doubt
impersonality.
• Dissent
• Deindividuation. Deindividuation
occurs when a person’s identity with a • Threat
group overrides their own identity and
• Disobedience
self-awareness. It can lead to a mob
mentality, because deindividuation tends
to prevent critical thinking and dissent.
BEYOND OBEDIENCE: SACRIFICING FOR A
People in groups often feel less
HIGHER CAUSE
individual responsibility for their behavior
• Think of a modern terrorist who, for the
sake of a higher cause, sacrifices his or
her life in a suicide mission. While each
person is unique and some are coerced,
there also are volunteers willing and
even eager to die for their cause.
• Of course, whether the cause is “noble”
is subjective and will be seen in a very
different light by the other side,
especially the victims.