Groups can influence people

The other reason people conform and go along with the crowd is that we all want to be liked and accepted.

The desire to fit in is so strong that people sometimes conform to a group consensus even when it goes against their own judgment—at least in public. When the pressure from others gets more explicit, conformity blends into another type of social influence: compliance, when we respond to a direct request made by someone else.

Social scientists have identified various compliance strategies, and you may be using some of them—or have been the target of them—without being aware of it. This is called the foot-in-the-door technique.

When pressure from others gets even stronger, it can lead to obedience —when we respond to a demand issued by an authority figure.

The world is full of orders given by people who have power over us, either in person the boss, a cop, your parent or via written words as on road signs. The pressure to conform in such situations can be extreme, and obedience can have a dark side.

In one famous experiment , a researcher set up a situation where subjects had to decide whether to follow orders to inflict pain on another person. The disturbing results showed how hard it is for people to resist authority. This experiment was done decades ago, in a different social time. Scientists recently ran a modified version of the study. The test subjects reacted similarly, confirming the powerful role of social influence.

Social influence also plays an important role when people work in groups. Much of this influence is direct or intentional—for example, we often work harder because our co-workers are depending on us to meet a deadline. For instance, Jane asks her parents to pay for her vacation to Australia. They flat-out refuse, because it is extremely expensive.

The same request made in isolation, however just asking for a trip to New York , would not have been as effective. This technique is frequently employed by car salesmen. Low-balling gains compliance by offering the subject something at a low initial cost.

The cost may be monetary, time related, or anything else that requires something from the individual. After the subject agrees to the initial cost, the requester increases the cost at the last moment. The subject is more likely to comply with this change in cost since he or she feels like an agreement has already occurred. Low-balling : Low-balling is a tactic frequently used by salesmen. They will initially quote a deceptively low offer and raise the price dramatically after an informal agreement has taken place but before a contract is signed.

For example, before Anna goes to ask for time off from her manager, Anthony, she does a little research and discovers that he enjoys golfing. When she sees Anthony next time, she starts out talking about her golfing trip last weekend, and later in the conversation she requests time off.

Since Anna has now ingratiated herself with Anthony, he is more likely to comply with her request. This is based on the social norm that people will return a favor when one is granted to them. In psychology, conformity is defined as the act of matching attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors to group norms.

Conformity is the most common and pervasive form of social influence. It is informally defined as the tendency to act or think like members of a group. While conformity is often viewed as a negative characteristic in American culture, it is very common. While high levels of conformity can be detrimental, a certain amount of conformity is necessary and normal, and even essential for a community to function. It is generally distinguished from obedience behavior influenced by authority figures and compliance behavior influenced by peers.

Conformity may result from either subtle, unconscious influences or direct and overt social pressure. It does not require the physical presence of others to occur—that is, knowledge of public opinion may cause an individual to conform to societal norms even when alone.

There are two major motivators to conformity: normative influence and informational influence. Normative influence occurs when an individual conforms in order to gain social acceptance and avoid social rejection. Both men and women will conform to current norms in order to be accepted by society and avoid social rejection. Informational influence occurs when individuals seek out members of their own group to obtain and accept accurate information about reality. The opposite effect is true as well: if Susan has been unemployed for a long time, employers may assume it is because others have not wanted to hire her.

They will, therefore, try harder to find flaws in her and her application. A number of factors are known to increase the likelihood of conformity within a group. Some of these are as follows:. His initial experiment in was set up as follows. The participant would enter a room and sit at a table with several other people.

These people were confederates , or individuals who were posing as other participants but were really working for the researchers. The participant and confederates would be shown a series of cards that had a reference line and another card that had three comparison lines.

Over the course of several trials, subjects were required to select the comparison line that corresponded in length to the reference line. The participant and confederates were instructed to provide their answers out loud, and the confederates were told to sometimes unanimously provide a correct answer and sometimes an incorrect answer. An individual was asked to state which line, A, B, or C, matched the first line. If the other members of the group gave an obviously incorrect response, the participant was more likely to also give an obviously incorrect response A or B.

Asch repeated this experiment with different experimental variables and identified several factors that influence conformity. Presence of a true partner, who was another real participant and gave the correct response, decreased levels of conformity.

Removing this partner halfway through the study caused increased levels of conformity after their departure. Group size also influenced levels of conformity such that smaller groups resulted in less conformity than larger groups.

Related Essays. The Controversial Issue of the Positive and Negative Influence and Effects of Violence in TV Shows on Crime in Society Pages: 8 words Should the police force be able to use positive discrimination to recruit and promote more people from minority groups? This is just a sample. You can get a custom paper by one of our expert writers.

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Send me the sample. By clicking Send Me The Sample you agree to the terms and conditions of our service. We'll not send you spam or irrelevant messages. Please indicate where to send you the sample. Your sample has been sent. It is this situation that will lead to free riding. This means you can decrease your effort and benefit from the efforts of others group members. In this situation, it is important to make sure that members are evaluated and identifiable.

If you are like me and found yourself in groups where you seemed to care the most about the outcome, then you were always worried that you would do more of the work and the other group members would just free ride or social loaf, depending on the task that was assigned. They would get credit for all your work. It is important to not use groups or teams if an individual can do the task easily.

Tasks that involve or require a lot of effort and work, are the kind that should be assigned to groups or teams. Similarly, you want the task to be something the group is interested in and stimulated by. Research has also found that when group members feel close to each other, are punished for poor performance or when the group sets their own goals, they are less likely to lack motivation.

David Dodd created this classroom demonstration to allow us to experience deindividuation from the classic theory perspective. He also hoped to show that even students and a few prisoners would respond with anti-normative behavior. He used college students and 29 prisoners taking college courses in prison.

The prompt that should be responded to is below:. The responses were categorized according to content and social desirability. These categories were then rated on social desirability. Every time I have used this demonstration, this has been the single most common response. Sometimes, they specify to help others and sometimes just the three simple words: rob a bank. So, how do you fit and what does this demonstration have to do with deindividuation theory?

These ideas were expanded on by Zimbardo and he specified that there were conditions that must be present for deindividuation to occur in a group setting. He suggested quite a few: anonymity, not feeling personally responsible, arousal, sensory overload, novel or unstructured situations, and conscious-altering substances such as drugs and alcohol could lead to deindividuated behaviors. He defined deindividuated behaviors to be those that went against what was considered appropriate.

He did believe that they could be prosocial, but his primary focus was antisocial behavior. If you look back at our demonstration, you can see that the focus here is on the condition of anonymity and lack of personal responsibility, possibly higher arousal.

First, Zimbardo did a set of three studies that are fairly well known. In one study, he placed participants in oversized lab coats and hoods. The control group wore name tags and normal clothes. The idea was to see if anonymity would result in an increase in anti-normative behavior. Another study examining the impact of anonymity looked at aggressive driving behaviors.

This field study examined the horn-honking behavior of either convertibles or 4 X 4s with top up identifiable condition or top down anonymous condition. The confederate would pull in front of the car and when the light changed, they would hesitate to go. The horn-honking was measured in the first 12 seconds after the light changed. They looked at how quickly they honked when light changed, how long they pressed on the horn and the number of times they honked.

The results again supported the anonymity leading to anti-normative behavior — more aggressive driving by horn honking Ellison, et al. There is one more important contribution to this classic theory. Diener refined the theory a bit and added that deindividuation was occurring because of the psychological mechanism of self-awareness reduction.

It concluded that the less self-aware we are, the more deindividuated and the less likely we are to adhere to our personal norms and values. The well-known study done with children and Halloween candy helped him illustrate his point. Taking more than one would be considered a violation of the norm that is presented. Results support the prediction that kids who were more anonymous would engage in more anti-normative behavior and take more candy Diener, et al.

There is a variation where there is a mirror behind the candy bowl and they are asked their name and address, and when made more self-aware, they take less candy.

Researchers attributed this to the anonymity reducing self-awareness when wearing a disguise Beaman, et al. These studies are fascinating and it seems to make sense that anonymity, large groups, and lack of self-awareness would lead someone to feel they could violate norms and go against the group.

For the classical theory of deindividuation, researchers findings were overall inconclusive. Only very small effects were found for deindividuation causing antinormative behavior: specifically, in the condition where there was a group present and reduced responsibility. This should leave us with some concern as to whether deindividuation as described in classical theory exists.

Alternative explanations to deindividuation effects — SIDE theory. So, how can we explain what these researchers found or what we see when large groups of people get together?

Why does it seem like every time a large group gets together they do something wrong, like looting, acts of aggression between protestors, or tearing down goal posts?

We definitely see these behaviors as inappropriate and violations of our societal social norms. It is wrong to hurt people and their property. The real or imagined pressure of others usually results in us following the group social norms, not going against them. Violating norms is extremely difficult and done rarely by most of us.

We learned above that we need the group to survive, feel good about ourselves, etc. This study, if you remember from the discussion above, had participants wearing a disguise to create anonymity and show that people will be more likely to engage in the antinormative behavior of shocking more than when they were identifiable.

This anonymity should result in increased antinormative behavior, which in this study is shocking another human.

It is expected that both of these conditions will lead you to shock more than the condition where you are identifiable. This again is in line with the classic deindividuation theory.

The results found only a small increase in shocking from the KKK-like clothes and then, surprisingly, the nurses went in the other direction and shocked less compared to our control condition. They were more prosocial in their behavior. What does this tell us? What does it mean? It means that it is possible that we found these findings based on situational, local group norms. Nurses are supposed to help so it triggers a norm of not hurting. It is possible that by placing a nametag on the participant wearing the uniform that it made the group salient for them and made them consider the norms associated with the group, possibly norms of aggression.

So, again, just following the social norms of the salient group. They suggested that the setup of these studies and real life situations where we combine anonymity, the closeness of the group and group immersion, actually makes the group importance and norms stronger for the person.

The one shared aspect with classical deindividuation is the focus on anonymity. They see anonymity from immersion in the group to reduce self-awareness and make group identity more salient Reicher et al. The most robust finding was that the conditions of anonymity, larger groups and reduced self-awareness which from classic deindividuation theory, should result in anti-normative behavior actually resulted in greater conformity to the situational norms.

So, we are seeing a specific form of social regulation and not the breakdown of regulations as previously thought. If I had made certain group norms salient, would it change how you responded to the initial prompt. For example, family, being male or female, being a student, or parent, etc.? What do you think? Would your answer change?