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Psychology of Communication: social influence
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Psychology of Communication: social influence
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When we find ourselves in groups we inevitably find ourselves in the minority occasionally. Generally speaking, we will feel a little uncomfortable with that situation, which explains why we generally seek out groups with interests similar to our own. Imagine, though, that you are in a group where you are sure you are right and everyone else is wrong. Would you yield to group pressure and go along with everyone else?
Sherif's experiment involved the so-called autokinetic effect whereby a point of light in an otherwise totally dark environment will appear to move randomly. You may have experienced the effect yourself when looking at the stars. Subjects were invited to estimate the amount of 'movement' they observed. They made their estimates in groups where each member could hear the others' estimates. Ultimately, the group members' estimates converged on a middle-of-the-road 'group estimate'. This would appear to show an urge to conform.
In effect, it's probably about what you would expect, if you remember that much perception appears to involve 'hypothesis-testing'. For example, with the Rubin vase (click here: 
if you'd like to take a look at it) there is not enough information for us to decide what we are seeing. We form the hypothesis that we're looking at two faces, then the hypothesis that we're seeing a vase. As there's not enough information to decide for one hypothesis or the other, our brains keep switching between the two. So you could argue that all the subjects
were doing was to use additional information from their environment (other people's estimates) to aid in arriving at a decision. (see section on Perception)
There is general acceptance that 'social influence' can be seen to consist of two separate components: 'informational social influence', where we gain information from other people's behaviour as a guide to what's going on, and 'normative social influence', where we conform to what we believe to be the norms of the group in order to be accepted by them.
Another experiment, which is more focused on testing normative influence was conducted by Solomon Asch:
In Asch's experiments, a group of people were seated around a table. Of these all but one were actually the experimenters confederates. The group was shown a display of vertical lines of different lengths and were asked to say which of the lines (card B below) was the same length as another standard line (card A).
One after another, the members of the group announced their decision. The confederates had been asked to give the incorrect response. The subject sat in the next to last seat so that all but one had given their obviously incorrect answer before s/he gave hers/his. Even though the correct answer was always obvious, the average subject conformed to the group response on 32% of the trials and 74% of the subjects conformed at least once.
On the face of it, an astonishing result. The correct answer was entirely obvious. Subjects had to override the very clear evidence of their own senses to give an answer conforming to the others'. Why did they do it?
When interviewed afterwards, subjects all said that they had been influenced by the pressure from the rest of the group. This, on the face of it, may appear to be an example of 'groupthink'. However, we normally associate 'groupthink' with those groups where cohesion has already been established - which was not the case in Asch's experiment. What, then, may have been the factors involved?
Many said that they did not want to appear silly. That ties in with Rom Harré's claim that one of our secondary needs is a need for 'social respect', which includes the need to avoid looking ridiculous in front of others, the need to avoid criticism from others. That need would be likely to motivate us to seek compromise with others (see the section on Motivation) - and seems to be supported by some subjects' reports after the experiment that they wished to avoid embarrassment.
There is also the possibility, as with Sherif's experiment that subjects were using other persons' responses as guidelines to what was going on - which would appear to be reflected in some subjects' claims after the experiment that they were unaware of having given incorrect responses. We establish hypotheses as to what's going on and will observe other people's behaviour to test our hypotheses against. Asch's results are quite consistent with that.
All the subjects in Asch's experiments were students. Each student would perceive the group as a reference group. We tend to conform with our reference groups, people we like and enjoy being with and by whom we want to be liked. Maybe if all the mebers of the group had been stockbroker, the student subjects would have been less willing to conform.
Oddly enough, research shows that the pressure to conform does not increase as the groups size increases above around four or five. One possible reason, suggested by Wilder (1977) in Baron and Byrne (1984) is that the subjects begin to suspect collusion amongst the group members once the group goes beyond that number. If that is the case, then that suggests that the best way to influence a person would be to get them to receive the same message from a variety of independent small groups, rather than from a single large group. That seems also to fit with Noelle-Neumann's view that, as the interpersonal support for the deviant opinion decreases, so the deviant opinion will be weakened and the dominant opinion become even more dominant (see the section on Spiral of Silence).
In Asch's later experiments, he introduced others who disagreed with the consensus. This disagreement led to a marked increase in the subjects' readiness to disagree with the dominant view. Other experiments have also shown that social support can help us to resist conformity, even if the person giving us the support is not particularly competent and even if she doesn't share our views. It seems that any old support will do. However, the support is more likely to be successful if she is competent and does share our views. It also seems to be especially important that dissent, if it is to be effective, should be voiced early on in the proceedings.
It is conceivable that we are genetically predisposed towards social conformism and ethnocentrism (i.e. the tendency to support and conform to the norms of our own group). Such a predisposition would be advantageous in promoting cultural group selection in the same way that in natural selection sharp teeth or the ability to run fast from something with sharp teeth confer an advantage. Sociobiologists found it difficult to account for such behaviours as altruism, co-operation and group loyalty in terms of Darwin's theory of evolution, which would be expected to lead to primarily egocentric behaviour. However, it might be possible to demonstrate (theorists disagree over this) that cultures whose members' behaviour is purely egocentric tend to die out whereas co-operative cultures survive. If so, then it would follow that the surviving cultures are those with the 'co-operation gene'. That would go some way to explaining the behaviour of Asch's subjects.
As an irrelevant aside, I should say that, personally, though this is an interesting idea, I'm inclined to treat it with a measure of caution. Evolutionary psychology is currently rather fashionable and is certainly challenging and thought-provoking, but it does sometimes seem to depend rather suspiciously on finding an adaptive advantage for every human behaviour. Behaviours which are clearly not advantageous are explained by saying that they 'must have' been advantageous at some point in our evolutionary history and then finding a likely scenario. For example, our sweet tooth leads to massive overconsumption of sugar. This is obviously not likely to give our species an evolutionary advantage today, but it 'must have' done so when a sweet tooth meant a predilection for a diet of fruit. Hmmm..... That rather neatly and conveniently shelters the evolutionary psychologists' claim from any possible falsifiability. Evolution here becomes a kind of psychologist's unified 'theory of everything'. The essential difference between the psychologist's theory of everything and the physicist's is that it is not even falsifiable in principle and seems in some of its formulations to have more in common with religion than with science. There is, to put it mildly, a degree of circularity in a theory which depends on the idea that certain characteristics confer an evolutionary advantage, if we begin by assuming that the organisms which have survived the evolutionary struggle are superior because they survived. Whilst there is no doubt much truth in that, it overlooks the rôle played by sheer luck in the struggle for survival and cannot in itself provide justification for the claim that every characteristic of a surviving organism must have contributed to its success. Having sounded that note of caution, though, I should say that in the hands of a Steven Pinker (1994 and 1998)the combination of pyscholinguistics, a computational theory of mind and evolutionary psychology strikes me as having enormous explanatory power, as well as providing a challenge to some of the loopier ideas of some branches of cultural studies.
Asch's experiment has been criticised for being unrealistic to the extent that in the real world we expect to take decisions on subjects more complex and more important than the length of a line. In the real world, therefore, we might put up more of a fight to defend our point of view. On more complex issues, we could reasonably expect that a variety of shades of opinion might be expressed, giving us more chance to argue our point of view. On the other hand, though, just think what the studies reveal. They suggest that group pressure can be so strong that we are willing to deny the evidence of our own eyes for the sake of conformity with the rest of the group.
There have been other experiments which have tended to confirm Asch's results by and large. Crutchfield's lengthier and more complex experiments seem to confirm a correlation between high intelligence and other personality traits and low conformity.
What should not be overlooked is that these experiments are just that - experiments. It is never easy to know to what extent the results can transfer to the real world with the wide range of variables involved.
Why people conform is open to conjecture. Hirshleifer and his colleagues propose the explanation of an 'informational cascade'. A person who considers what style of clothes to wear can take into account either their own independent judgment or others' judgment, or a combination of the two. In a culture such as ours which has traditionally placed great value on the individual, simply following the herd may be characterized as weak, stupid etc. Whatever, the fact remains that most of us do go along with everyone else, or flared trousers and Afro haircuts would still be worn by many of us old hippies. There are very sound reasons for doing so, which we have internalized over millions of years of evolution. Picture one of our distant ancestors living out on the savannah. If that person goes off to join a group of forest dwellers, it would be pretty stupid to persist in looking for particular forms of succulent and nutritious grass, rather than conforming to the forest-dwellers' norm of gathering berries and fruits. There is a survival advantage in conforming. Over the course of evolution, those groups which have succeeded through co-operation in their established practices are the successful ones. Thus the urge to conform and copy others' behaviour is one which confers an evolutionary advantage. Of course, we don't simply conform to such practical behaviours as gathering food, we also conform to religions, fashions, fads, extremist political movements and so on. And the evolutionary advantage there is not immediately obvious, but you should bear in mind that we are a species which operates in groups, groups which compete against other groups:
... in a small band of hunter-gatherers, it might have been a ... useful habit to obey the fashion. To a large extent, human society is not a society of individuals, as the society of leopards, or even lions, is - albeit the individual lions are lumped together in groups. Human society is composed of groups, superorganisms. THe cohesiveness of groups that conformity achieves is a valuable weapon in a world where groups must act together to compete with other groups. That the decision may be arbitrary is less important than that it is unanimous.
1997)
Ridley puts this even more bluntly elsewhere in his book:Humankind, I suggest, has always fragmented into hostile and competitive tribes and those that found a way of drumming cultural conformity into the skulls of their members tended to do better than those that did not.
When we examine the results of experiments in social psychology, it is worth asking ourselves what, if anything, we consider to have been proven and within what intellectual and social framework the 'proof' has been delivered. Since Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, it has been commonly accepted that science does not proceed on the basis of the patient observation of facts, from which general conclusions are then drawn, but, rather, that science operates within the framework of a dominant 'paradigm'. By 'paradigm' we may understand the set of theories and assumptions about the way the universe functions. This paradigm determines what scientists set out to look for in their experiments in the first place and shapes their interpretation of their observations.
If this is the case in the natural sciences, we may reasonably assume that it applies to social psychology as well. What has happened to all those mediæval cases of demonic possession? How come we don't see such cases any more? We don't see any of course because we don't look for them. Demonic possession isn't an item in the pscyhologist's toolkit, it is no longer a part of our paradigmatic conception of human nature and behaviour. More recently, where have all those Freudian hysterics gone? Presumably, they've gone the same way as the paradigm. To what extent did nineteenth century romanticism make Freudian psychoanalysis possible? To what extent is twentieth century modernist rationality responsible for the decline in Freud's fortunes?
So, when it comes to the experiments of social psychology, we need to bear in mind that they too are formulated within a paradigm. The way that people behave is not susceptible of a single ahistorical meaning. People's behaviours are not transparent; they need to be interpreted if they are to acquire meaning and the interpretation which they are given depends on the pre-existing assumptions and theories we have established about the way the world works and the place that people's behaviours have within that world. And
These theories have no basis in fact; any facts about the mind used in their support would have necessitated the use of such theories. In effect, the psychological world so dear to the heart of many social psychologists is a social construction, and the findings used to justify statements about this world are only valid insofar as one remains within the theoretical (and metatheoretical) paradigms of the field. Research findings don't have any meaning until they are interpreted, and these interpretations are not demanded by the findings themselves. They result from a process of negotiating meaning within the community.
Gergen (undated)
Also:scientific accounts of mental processes are candidates for truth status, and to achieve truth is to claim superiority over (and thus to marginalize) all competing forms of discourse. Yet, regardless of the extent and rigor of the research practices, the resulting account is a textual achievement. No less than the novelist, the psychologist must employ techniques of literary construction to render scientific accounts acceptable.
Gergen (undated2)
Deindividuation
Diffusion of responsibility
Obedience
Rebellion
Minority influence
Power of social rôles
Conflict resolution
Groups and Teams
Mass Media Effects Research
Political Propaganda and Persuasion
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