The Three Basic Types Of Social Influence On Behavior

Driving in a car with a same-age passenger, and feeling more susceptible to distractions. Allowing gruesome traditions because you fear the consequences of showing your ambivalence towards it. Bullying an innocent child for his facial deformity since all of your “friends” do too. All of the foregoing instances reflect what’s known as social influence. Social influence at its core is the process by which an individual’s attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors, are altered by others.

Often times in life people will feel it necessary to conform in order to fit into certain groups of people. When a person conforms it usually leads to them changing the way they behave. This

Social influences- can be various factors that affects how individuals fit into society and how it can impact a person’s development and behaviour, depending upon their two main agents of socialisation. Primary agents of socialisation- which is your family who teach you how to behave appropriately within society, by teaching you values, norms and rules that are seen as acceptable within your culture to ensure that you behave acceptably within society. For example, It’s Akram’s family value/norm to follow the Islamic faith and regularly attend the local mosque and recite their prayers as it is a part of their religion. Which is seen as acceptable within society to follow these values as it is seen as the norm for their religious faith.

Social organizations pressure one another to conform to decisions made. How? Group conformity shows that individuals often seek agreement with the rest of its members. Concern towards what others think, members tend to comply with arrangements favored by the rest of the crowd. Conditions such as leadership, positions, and circumstances make us believe we need to yield to what society implies is right.

Conformity refers to the likelihood that an individual will follow the unspoken rules or behaviors of the social group to which they belong. In the short video clip titled “Asch Conformity Experiment”, we learned that people can feel pressured into abnormal behavior because of the unanimity of the majority.

The contents of this assignment will include multiple psychological theories to explain what ways an individual’s behaviour changes when he/she is part of a group. These theories will define social influence, conformity procedures within groups and social cognition, including the self-categorisation theory. Social groups are used in everyday living to represent beliefs, to work, play and to socialise. Groups can have a negative effect on an individual. Not been part of a group due to exclusion or stereotyping can create a negative effect.

Social Control – consists of the forces and processes that encourage conformity, including: self control, informal and formal control

There is a fundamental human need to belong to social groups especially if people were to live and work together, it is likely that they need to agree on common beliefs, values, attitudes and behaviours in order to get along and fit-in. Thus, we learnt to conform to rules of other people, the more people see others behaving in a particular way or making particular decisions, the more likely people will feel obliged to follow the suit. This is called conformity and can be defined in different ways, Aronson, Wilson & Akert (2014) stated it is the changing of one’s behavior due to the real or imagined influence of other people. According to Deutsch and Gerard (1955), social influence should be distinguished into two types, the informational social influence and normative social influence. The occurrence of social influence has implied to many real life events, which has drawn many researchers to attention. This has lead many researchers to design distinct experiments to try and understand the cause of the conformity, whether conformity is situation dependent, and whether we are able to resist social influences.

Conformity refers to an individual’s behavior that is performed because of group pressure, even though that pressure might not involve a direct request. Many people want to think that they are conformist enough so that they are not looked upon as strange to others and nonconformist enough to demonstrate that they are capable of thinking by themselves. For many years, psychologists have been interested in human conformity. Usually when people are in groups, they behave according to how those in the group behave. That indicates that conformity can affect a person’s behavior and make a person do things that may be against their ethics, attitudes, and morals. The study of

Informational Influence and Normative Influence are both categorized under conformity in sociology. Informational is basically when we conform to others behavior because we believe it provides information about reality. It is often when we care about getting the right answer and trying to be rational. It also deals with the "Maybe they know something I don't know" phenomenon. An example, could be choosing to eat at a busier restaurant opposed to the empty one, or imitating the locals when outside your country. In contrast, Normative Influence is when we conform to others behavior because they expect us to. This is when we believe conforming may have positive consequences, such as approval or the enhancement of our reputation, or when we believe not conforming may have negative consequences, such as disapproval or punishment. An example of Normative Influence is laughing at a joke you don't get, or agreeing with an opinion you believe in others.

To start with it is important to determine what each of these social processes mean, in order to understand which psychological factors are involved. Conformity is a behavioural change in response to social pressure, either real or imagined. Compliance is a behaviour change in response to an explicit request to perform an action. Obedience is a behaviour change in response to a demand or order to carry out an action. Each of these processes are undertaken due to different psychological pressures being put on the individual, from believing that they have no choice but to carry out the action – obedience, to carrying out the action because they want to feel accepted.

Conformity is a concept that has been heavily researched in the field of social psychology. Conformity is defined as a change in behavior, beliefs, and attitudes due to group pressure perceived as real (encompassing the presence of others) or imagined (encompassing the pressure of social standards) (Myers, 2010, p. 192). The concept of conformity is a powerful influence on the tendency for people to arrange their thoughts, perspectives, and ideas with others, especially when in a group. This takes away from a person’s individuality because they want to feel accepted by others and therefore, a person will accomplish this basic need of approval through conforming.

Social Impact Theory, developed by Latane in 1981, theorizes, “A person’s feelings, attitudes, and behaviors can be altered by the presence of others.” This is spilt up into three categories of; how important the person/group is to the individual (strength), How close in proximity the person/group is to the individual (immediacy), and the size of the influencing group (number). All of these elements combined are often attributed to conformity behaviors seen in peer pressure. Peer pressure can be defined as; the pressure that you feel to behave in a certain way because your friends or people in your group expect it (Cambridge 2015). All individuals face a great deal of pressure to fit in at every stage of their lives. Whether it is from their

In social psychology, social influence is a process where someone’s beliefs, thoughts and behaviour change by being exposed to beliefs, thoughts and opinions of others. It manifests in several forms, such as obedience, compliance and conformity. All these types of social influence have been studied by numerous researchers who investigated the reasons why people conform to social norms and obey to authorities, such as Milgram’s classic studies on obedience. His experiments support the popular idea of ‘banality of evil’ –Hannah Arendt (1963)’s famous phrase referring to the capability to accomplish dreadful things out of banal reasons–, revealing that people conform submissively and thoughtlessly to the orders that authorities deliver, no

Your peers are the people with whom you identify and spend time. In children and teens, they are usually, but not always, of the same age group. In adults, peers may be determined less by age and more by shared interests or professions. Peer pressure occurs when an individual experiences implied or expressed persuasion to adopt similar values, beliefs, and goals, or to participate in the same activities as those in the peer group.