This is the 8th and final lecture of [[Keith Campbell]]'s [[PA Intro to Psychology]] course on [[Peterson Academy]] which is all about [[Social Psychology|social psychology]]. Much of this has to do with Keith's other lecture [[Self in Society]] where some of these ideas were further elaborated. --- ## Influence How we are influenced by social factors is called social influence, and it can be divided into: 1. Normative influence—with blending in and being liked as the motivation, and 2. Informational influence—with being right as the motivation. This means that the two driving forces of our social behavior is to be liked and be right. ### Feeling of social influence Bibb Latane's Social Impact Theory model argued that social influence works a lot like energy. What best predicts social influence is: 1. Strength (in terms of status and importance) of audience 2. Immediacy of speaking 3. Number of people listening --- ## Social Influences ### Persuasion Psychologists at Yale figured out that these things matter for persuasion: 1. People like perceived expertise and attractiveness.[^1] 2. Whether the message is one or two sided. One sided messages work well for already trusting audiences. Two sided messages quenches smarter or more skeptical people's higher need for cognition thus works better on them as they want to feel like they came to terms with the message themselves instead of being fed propaganda. 3. The audience's need for cognition—is it high or low? 4. Ego involvement, aka how interested or invested is your audience #### Dual process persuasion Based on the  Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM), persuasion works in dual processes just like our thinking systems: - Peripheral, automatic, heuristic route - Does not invite deep persuasion, but leads to attitudinal shifts in people that don't really care. - Controlled, central, systematic route - Has to be presented as an argument, and is pitted against the audience's counterarguments. Bad arguments not only do not persuade, but become anti-arguments instead—boomerang effect. All important messaging campaigns do both processes, one for people's gut-feeling impressions, the other for people's rational reasoning. --- ### Conformity Willingness of people to align with other people's beliefs. The classic study for this is the [[Ash Conformity Studies|Ash Conformity Studies (1951)]], which made participants identify the longest line out of three, to which the answer is obvious. 6 out of 7 participants were confederates and give the wrong answer. About one-third of participants conform and gave the wrong answer as well. Some were influenced and conformed on an informational level—meaning they thought they were right; Others were conforming on a normative level of influence by not going against the group despite knowing the answer is wrong. --- ### Compliance Compliance is whether or not people people with comply with the requests given, most famously studied by Robert Cialdini, author of the book Persuasion. He observed certain behavioral cues that increase people's likelihood to comply, dubbed principles of persuasion: - Norm of reciprocity - People tend to want to give back. Hare Krishna gave flowers at airports and asked for donations. This is also in sales everywhere. - Scarcity - People buy more when it is scarce. - Similarity - Invoke shared points of interests, like mutual friends, same hometown, same favorite team etc. Gives a feeling of familiarity. - Foot-in-the-door technique - Get people comfortable with a small product, before hitting them with a way bigger one. They are more likely to purchase the bigger one if they have already had the small one, instead of just hitting them with the bigger one. - Door-in-the-face technique - Make an outrageously big request that gets rejected, before asking for something smaller (more reasonable). --- ### Obedience Stanley Milgram was studying kill-on-order phenomenon after the world witnessed the Holocaust during World War II. More than two-thirds of people were would-be murderers based on his experiment that led people to that end stage by an incremental increase foot-in-the-door technique. The participants were alone in the experiment. Repeat the experiment with two people together in the room and they will resist authority much earlier. --- ## Dealing with social influence Social influence is usually good, because the group is usually right and usually aimed towards the good, but not always and that is what our caution should be focused on. ### Ways to resist social influence - Find expertise you trust - Finding allies - Be comfortable not being liked — increase disagreeableness and antagonism - Replace unhealthy influence with healthy ones --- ## Group Behavior It is super natural and easy to put people into groups, just the [[Mere Categorization|mere categorization]] of them would do it. Members get self-esteem, identity, and compete themselves against other groups with something like strategic comparisons. People maintain their self-esteem with the successes of their group, like Cialdini's observation that college students were their football team jerseys more after a team win, and merch sales go up too. That also means it can be an unhealthy shortcut to self-esteem. There are problems with group-based identity and behavior, one of which is: - Discontinuity effect - The nicest individuals may become the nastiest people in groups due to the low trust nature of groups vs groups in comparison to the generally high trust nature of individuals vs individuals. The nicest individuals can be the most protective of their in group, which makes them nasty against their out-group. The [[Robert's Cave Experiment|Robert's Cave Experiment]] by [[Muzafer Sherif]] showed that it is super easy to break apart a group of friends and turn them into hostile groups by simply putting them into two rivaling football teams. Putting them back together is not as easy. What has to happen is for them to identify a higher-level out-group or a "common enemy," or a common goal that they have to come together to go against. [^1]: Rob Henderson draws the important distinction between perceived expertise, which he calls elitism, and actual expertise. Real experts don't always get seen as experts in the public domain, due to their more nuanced thus less confident way of analyzing and speaking.