Social Influence and Social Action

Aspects of Social Influence

Social facilitation: the observation that the presence of other people can influence how well we perform on a task often improving our performance. E.g., student do work more faster when they work with others rather than alone. Audience Effects : the way that people will often act differently when there others present or observing from how they would act if they are alone and unobserved. Factors influencing audience effects Evaluation: as if the audience consisted on experts rather than students Size and status : people become more nervous infront of larger people

Theories of Audience Effect

High drive state: People performed life sustaining tasks well but likely to make errors in complex tasks which needs attention. Distraction-Conflict theory.

Self-presentation theory.

Social loafing
The observed tendency in some situations for individuals to devote less effort to a group task than they would give to the same task if they were doing it on their own. E.g., college students asked them to make noise as much as they could. Students produced far less noise when they were in group rather than alone.

Roles and groups

Social role A role or a social role is a set of connected behaviors, rights and obligations as conceptualised by actors in a social situation. It is an expected or free or continuously changing behaviour and may have a given individual social status or social position. E.g., if I go into a library to look for a book, I know what kind of behavior I am expected to show, and I am likely to conform it. Role expectations: expect from others. Social sanctions Role models

The Stanford prison study

Simulated the prison environment 21 male research participants who are assessed as emotionally stable 9 of them acted as prisoner and rest were to act as guards After 5th day of experiment, it was halt due to some psychological effects. Thus social setting makes the role as well.

Leadership
process of social influence in which one person can enlist the aid and support of others in the accomplishment of a common task,(Chemers M.,1997). Weber identified three sources of a leaders authority Rational grounds refers that legal authority of the leader is the representative of legitimate patterns of normative rules. Traditional grounds belief that the continuity of social structures is important Charismatic grounds state that the character and social recognition of a particular individual character is important for leadership

Types of leaders
Two dimensions of leaderships Consideration dimension is concerned with how the leader relates to other people e.g., positive relationship at work place. Initiative structure dimension is to do with how the leader organises and structures the tasks for his team. It is suggested that interpersonally oriented supervisor tended to have the most productive departments

Situation-dependent leadership
Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard called, Situational Leadership. The premise for Situational Leadership is that there is not one single best form of leadership, but that it is dependent on the situation and on the follower, and that successful situational leaders are able to adjust their leadership style to fit different situations and people accordingly. In situational leadership, a majority of the emphasis is on the follower, and uses what Hersey and Blanchard call follower readiness as the basis for deciding what style of leadership is the best fit.

Fiedlers contingency theory

Emphasized how the effectiveness of the leaders style is contingent on the overall situation. Suggested two types of leader: task-centered(who have as their prime concern carrying out the task itself) relationship-centered (those who tend to accomplish the task by developing good relationships with the group). Both types can be effective if their leadership orientation fits the situation. Depends on three factors, quality of the relationship of the leader with his subordinates, leaders formal position in terms of power and resources that they can utilize for performing the task and how structured the task itself is.

Leadership style
Lewin investigated in 1939 seminal work on the influence of leadership styles and performance The researchers evaluated the performance of groups of eleven-year-old boys under different types of work climate. In each, the leader exercised his influence regarding the type of group decision making, praise and criticism (feedback), and the management of the group tasks (project management) according to three styles: authoritarian, democratic, and laissez-faire.

Autocratic or authoritarian style

Under the autocratic leadership style, all decision-making powers are centralized in the leader, as with dictators. Those boys who had authoritarian leader tended to work independently and in competition with one another. They didnt help each other and only do work hard in the presence of the leader.

Participative or democratic style

The democratic leadership style favors decision-making by the group. Such a leader gives instructions after consulting the group. Boys worked reasonably and consistently under the presence of democratic leader. They showed mutual coordination and cooperate with each other.

Laissez-faire or free rein style

A free-rein leader does not lead, but leaves the group entirely to itself. Such a leader allows maximum freedom to subordinates; they are given a free hand in deciding their own policies and methods. Boys showed restlessness and quarrelsome and didnt do much work at all. Different situations call for different leadership styles. In an emergency when there is little time to converge on an agreement and where a designated authority has significantly more experience or expertise than the rest of the team, an autocratic leadership style may be most effective; however, in a highly motivated and aligned team with a homogeneous level of expertise, a more democratic or laissez-faire style may be more effective. The style adopted should be the one that most effectively achieves the objectives of the group while balancing the interests of its individual members

Vrooms decision-making model

How leaders make decisions. Vroom and Yetton developed an approach to leadership decision-making in which they examined 7 characteristics of situations that required decisions and examined which types of leadership styles would be most appropriate for each situation.

Conformity
Conformity is the act of matching attitudes, beliefs, and behaviours to what individuals perceive is normal of their society or social group. Sherif set up an experiment in which research participants experienced the Autokinetic effect. Conformity can occur in the presence of others, or when an individual is alone. For example, people tend to follow social norms when eating or watching television, even when alone. Aschs Studies Line judging task

Which line is the longest?

Conformity

Cont.

Harvard psychologist Herbert Kelman identified three major types of social influence: Compliance is public conformity, while possibly keeping one's own private beliefs. Identification is conforming to someone who is liked and respected, such as a celebrity or a favorite uncle. Internalization is accepting the belief or behavior and conforming both publicly and privately. Minority influence Although conformity generally leads individuals to think and act more like groups, individuals are occasionally able to reverse this tendency and change the people around them.

Obedience
One can influence someone else behaviour is by issuing a command which they feel obliged to obey. E.g., after the second world war, the nazi criminals who were put on trials they just defend themselves by saying that I was only obeying orders. Milgrams basic study Hoflings study of obedience

Milgrams basic study

It was a learning experiment. The paricipants were asked to read out words for a paired associate task. When they made the mistake they would receive the electric shock from their teacher started from 15V to 450 V (Actually this was not the real shock). During the whole time the research participants were supervised by an experimenter who gave them verbal prods when they hesitated or objected. It was found that the obedience rate was high.

Hoflings study of obedience

A real life study of obedience in hospital setting. A staff nurse was instructed by the doctor to administer an overdose to the patient on phone. As the drug was not authorized and that was a malpractice. On the other hand a nurse is supposed to obey instructions from the doctor. Result showed that social pressure also influence in a level of obedience which could lead to a nurse performing a dangerous act, just by obeying orders.

Milgrams Agency theory

Proposed that the normal inhibition of aggression towards people, which occurs when people see themselves as free, autonomous individuals, becomes suppressed when people see themselves as agents acting on behalf of someone else. The agentic state: in which people see themselves as being the agents of others, and in which individual conscience does not operate. The autonomous state: in which they see their actions as voluntary and self-directed, and in which conscience is fully operative.

Milgrams Agency theory

Milgram sees people as being trained into the agentic state from a very early age. E.g., a parent telling a child not to hit smaller children is partly encouraging the development of moral principles; but is also establishing the idea of obedience to authority. He suggested that the agentic state manifests through number of ways like Tuning, the person becomes attuned to orders or instructions received from the superiors. People in agentic state also tend to redefine the meaning of the situation, so that they can accept the explanation of their actions which is provided by the authority under which they are working. Another effect of agentic shift is that people no longer feel responsible for their actions, they just follow the command of authority.

Moral strain
Moral strain developed when the experimenter inflicted pain and high distressed among the learner e.g, they cried and issued demand Let me out of here. Some research participant used the mechanism Denial in order to minimize what was happening to their victims. Avoidance: Degree of involvement : help the learners by flipping of the switches or by focusing on the correct answer. Buffers which reduce the level of moral strain. E.g., physical distance ( the pilot of a bomber doesn't see the people who are killed), social distance

Rebellion against authority

Milgram also studied the reactions of those who disobeyed. According to him, disobedience followed a sequence that began with an inner doubt and then gradually into clear dissent. It is just like a psychological exit from the agentic state and a return to the autonomous state.

Crowd behavior
Large masses of people like in shopping mall etc which we experience usually most of the time. Crowd gain attention when people get together with a common purpose. Emile Durkhiem saw peaceful crowds as serving a valuable social purpose: state funeral.

Mob psychology
Crucial theory given by Le Bon, viewed crowds as inherently pathological, acting according to primitive impulses and lacking in rationality or reasoning power.

Crowds easily get aroused and operate as vicious animal. E.g., political overtones, tragically death of football supporters in the crowd.

Deindividuation
A loss of the personal identity.
Study of Zimbardo in which groups of college women were asked to deliver electric shocks to another woman. Half of them dressed in bulky lab coats and hoods which hid their faces and were never referred to by name. half were normally dressed in their clothes. Found that the deindividuated women were prepared to give shocks as those given by the individually identified women. Deiner proposed that deindividuation is reduced the selfawareness. When a person is a member of crowd feel no restrain of social convections and act impulsively.