Normative And Informational Social Influences

The author’s purpose is to show how easily people are influenced by society and those around them.

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.

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

Another factor in interpersonal attraction is Reciprocity, this is the tendency to be attracted to people who like us and tend to be less attracted to those individuals that dislike us. In a study carried out by Dittes & Kelley (1956) the findings show that participants conformed more when told ‘other group members like you’ in comparison when told ‘other group members dislike you’. People who have the tendency to have low self-esteem or are highly insecure concerning interpersonal relationships have a greater need for positive feedback from others around them, in order to form close interpersonal relationships.

Influence is powerful in determining one’s future. Actions behaviors and opinions are all connected to impact of others and the way they shape our views on the world as well as ourselves. Self-Image is dependent on the acceptance of others, thus always changing since one’s morals and ethics do not stay the same as time goes on. Influence of others play a role on how one tends to view themselves and people around them, by either being forced to conform to a country’s lifestyle, completing constant tasks to keep up with society’s demands, or being able to be content with oneself rather than being blinded of the onslaught of constant expectations.

Imagine a thirteen year old middle school girl, wearing Guess boots and an Abercrombie hood in order to fit in. Visualize a thirty five year old man listening to the top forty radio stations and watching American Idol, so he can have something to add to the discussion with his co-workers over coffee break. The various types of behaviours stated before are pertained to as conformity. Conformity refers to the process by which an individual's attitudes, beliefs, and behaviours are influenced by other individuals. Except, how do these necessities manipulate a being? Social psychologists have conducted an assortment of experiments and concluded that, through a range of forms of social influence, groups can alter their members’ personality.

Chapter 12 social psychology cover how we affect one another’s behaviors. Culture, stereotypes, prejudice, discrimination attitude, and interpersonal attraction are all factors that contribute to behavior in a social setting. Understanding how we influence one another on a social level forces us to look at not only ourselves, but also look at how others affect the world we live in and why it is important to be able to identify these influences and the impact they have on our behaviors good or bad

This experiment found that when a group of two other people refused to obey the conditions of the experiment, then the third person would most likely do the same.  It was found that, “The presence of others who are seen to disobey the authority figure reduces the level of obedience to 10%” (McLeod 588). A similar finding is noted in Solomon Asch’s “Opinions and Social Pressure”, where it was found that when someone is among their peers, they are more likely to conform to the group opinion. Asch acknowledges that social pressure plays a large role because the individual “must declare his judgments in public, before a majority which has also stated its position publicly” (Asch 599). This confirms the idea that an individual is more likely to conform when they are being judged by their

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.

Well, my current attitude is both influenced by conditioning and social influences. Though I believe myself to be a Christain, I wonder if I would be if I have not come from a Christain background. Despite my Christain background and what my private school taught me, I ended by being more on the liberal spetum. I see more people suffering on due to more right-leaning ideas. The choose between cognitive, affective or behavioral is a difficult one in my case. However, by today's standards, I think effective and behavioral are the strongest influences. People are easily lead by emotions and emotions are connected to our behaviors in general.

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.

Solomon Asch was a psychologist that conduced numerous expirments designed to illustrate the increasing conformity within social groups. The experiments also invesigated the effect the number of people present within the group had one the conformity rate. Asch hypothesized, “ that the majority of the people would not conform to something obviosly wrong; however, when surrounded by (other) individuals all voicing an incorrect answer, 75% of them(the participant) will conform to the groups answer” (Watzlawick 1976)

“Social influence is the process by which the actions of an individual or group affect the behavior of others” (Feldman 495). These influences are strongly experienced by members in the group. Every group is unique and is mostly guided by a particular norm and behavior. An individual in a group passively or actively allows himself to be influenced by the group just to have a sense of belongingness. In the bid to prevent being excluded or rejected from a group, some individuals overtly adhere to the norms of the group. “Thus, people conform to meet the expectations of the group” (Feldman 495).

We interact with a variety of people on a regular basis who influence our behavior but who are not family or friends. Many of these people we encounter because of their roles within particular social institutions with which we interact. They are part of our secondary group members; their opinions and behaviors shape us. Sometimes people live, work, eat, sleep and socialize in a single unit where their lives are largely controlled by those in charge; the organization controls the totality of one's life. (Goffman, 1961) Examples of them

All humans’ behavior is affected by social influences to some extent. The level of influence will vary from person to person, depending on the several factors, such as self-esteem, their level of self-awareness, morals, and values (Velden, 2007). People do many things to ensure they are accepted by the people in their group and to keep from being ostracized by individuals around them (Kowalski & Westen, 2011). Individuals are usually guided by their own sense of what is right or wrong and will make logical decisions based on this. However, they will sometimes completely push their own individual identity