Understanding Social Influence On Online Choice

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

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

First, the experiment Solomon Asch began in 1955 gives an example how social influence can sway or perception of reality. The results are an example of normative social influence and informational social influence. Additionally, the participants exhibit the need to gain a person’s approval, and was willing to accept others opinions about reality. Consequently, a persons moral sense

Studies show that what we choose can really affect our moods for the time being or even throughout a week. On pages 135-136 a study shows a group of volunteers went through a job interview. “Some of the volunteers were told that their interview would be seen by a judge…” (135) “Other volunteers were told that their interview would be seen by a jury…” (315) the volunteers not knowing that everyone would be rejected the job. The Pre

Participants in the mere exposure condition were then shown graphs of the response distributions for the sample that they belonged to, as well as a brief passage. The passage essentially explained to the participants that the graphs represented responses from other people who matched their artistic preference and demographic background and that people who share these commonalities also typically share similar psychological tendencies. Finally, participants responded to each of the initial items again after seeing this information. The persuasive argument condition had the same format as the first condition, except instead of being showed the results of the other participants from their sample, they were presented with persuasive arguments from other participants in their sample. He also matched the number of opposing and supporting arguments for each of the four items with the means for each sample to ensure that participants in this condition felt a similar amounts of group pressure.

An interesting question that scientists and philosophers have studied for hundreds of years is how large groups come together to make a common decision. This process is called social choice. The main aspect about social choice that has been addressed is how multiple choices of individuals in a group become one preference for the entire group. The main groups that have been studied in regard to social choice are human groups, and how we have developed a voting system to choose one outcome over many other alternatives. Humans are not the only group that participates in social choice. This also occurs in different animal groups, but has not been studied as long as social choice in human groups. In particular, the

It is already identified that the effect of social information on low-stakes decisions. According to Frey and Meir (2004), for example, people prefer to donate to charity on the condition that they know the high percentage of others’ donation.

In the experiment each candidate contributes positive, negative and ambiguous information. The information about each candidate is the same but the way that it is interpreted can differ greatly from person to person. One’s existing beliefs play a role in how this information is interpreted. For example if one of the ambiguous qualities is that the candidate has children. One could interpret this in a positive way by interpreting it as the candidate having family values and cares for their family. A negative way that this could be interpreted is that the candidate would not be focused on political issues that people care about, but rather they would be focused on being a good parent. Assuming there is gender bias, than more ambiguous qualities

Gilbert and Ebert offered participants a choice from a variety of paintings by famous artists. After their selection, half were given a return policy allowing them to freely exchange their painting for a month if they were unsatisfied, and the rest were told that their selection was final. Because they knew they were stuck with it, participants who didn’t have the opportunity to exchange their poster saw it in a more positive light than when they’d selected it. Participants who got the return policy did not receive this benefit and found the poster no more attractive than when they selected

Such a bold position requires a new approach to marketing.  The authors present a thesis of the Influence Mix, which introduces that there are three influences on consumer decision-making — the individual’s prior preferences, beliefs and experiences (P), other people and information services in the form of reviews and

After spending a good amount of the semester discussing and learning about Robert Cialdini, it is safe to say that no good discussion on influence and persuasion can go very far without talking about the man who wrote the book on influence. After learning about Cialdini, we now know what he identifies as the six weapons of influence. The six weapons are reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social proof, liking, authority and scarcity. By weapons, what Cialdini really relays, are the six behavioral triggers that tend to create habitual and expected compliance. To see if these influences really exist in the real world, we made trips to places where we were going to be potential customers, being sold a product or service by someone. We

There are also two types of social influences, normative and informative, that can affect a consumer’s purchase decision. A normative influence is the desire to conform to the expectations of another. An informative influence is to accept and trust information obtained as reality. (Bishop & Myers 1974). According to Lam & Meyers 1978, normative and informative influences are both relevant when purchasing a car as an individuals opinions can be influenced by group discussion. It is evident that normative social influences have a greater influence on groups as this is when an individual believes that conforming may have positive consequences and not conforming may have negative consequences. Whereas, informational social influences is often when we care about getting the right answer and trying to be rational. Both normative and informative influences affect the consumer purchase decision of purchasing a car.

Endorsement effect. By default, the decision makers will tend to continue with what they are actually doing (if the market is not diverse enough this bias cannot be corrected, if everyone asked is in Goggle then they might be influenced by this type of bias).

Research on the decoy effect (asymmetrical dominance, or attraction effect) has held its own in the world of marketing, and was introduced by Huber, Payne, and Puto (1982) when they demonstrated that the choices people make

Social media nowadays are bombarding people’s lives whether it is Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, LinkedIn, Orkut, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Groupon, and many more. Social media has changed how people interact with each other and how they express themselves on the Internet. Facebook, for example, has really altered people’s perception of themselves. We hypothesize that this altered perception in turn influences their behavior on product choices and involvement with particular groups.