Social influence and persuasion

Social Influence and Persuasion

Social influence is believed to occur when an individual's emotions, behaviors, or opinions are influenced by others'. Compliance, identification, internalization are the three broad varieties of social influence that have since been identified. Compliance occurs when people agree with others' opinions while keeping their dissenting opinions private. Identification is normally associated with very popular people like the celebrities. Such people easily influence people who believe in them. Internalization does happen when people, either publicly or privately, accept a belief or a behavior.

Social influence and persuasion are an integral tenet of communication. Persuasion is a form of social influence where audiences are intentionally encouraged to adopt an idea or a course of action through symbolic means. Activities that other people who stay around you engage are likely to determine how you behave. It is true that people differ from one another. However, some people have a tendency of overestimating their own individuality and uniqueness. Social influence does impact on ones way of behaving. Some of the notable social influences include conformism, obedience, deindividuation, and helping (Fiske, 2009).

Conformism in this context implies that an individual will always try to tune his or her behavior to the groups s/he subscribes to without direct order to do so. Conformism normally happen because nobody would want to be wrong because the members of the group trust the group's judgment over their own because the group contains more people. The more the group members are, the slimmer the chances that the group can be wrong. Conformism can also be attributed to acceptance. Many people would want their behaviors to conform to that of other group members so that they are accepted by such groups (Fiske, 2009).

Obedience is the most direct form of social influence. It is the reaction to an order especially an authority figure. Milgram Experiment, Zimbardo Stanford prison experiment, and the Hofling hospital experiment clearly attest to this. The Milgram experiment involved a test subject who could give an electric shock to another person when the person gave a wrong answer to a question. The agentic shift phenomenon was used to explain what was happening. The test subjects just relinquished their responsibilities for their own actions and finally became the agents of the test leader (Fiske, 2009).

Deindividuation as a form of social influence occurs when individuals lose their own personal identity because they are part of a crowd. Such individuals abandon their personal norms and values and in the process adopt the norms and values of the crowd. This may be both beneficial and detrimental. When a group an individual belongs to gets violent, there is likelihood that its members will also be violent (Vaughan & Hogg, 2005). When the group instead chooses to come to aid of someone, its members will have no option but to do the same. For Deindividuation to occur there has to be some element of increased excitement, anonymity, and decreased individual responsibility.