Communication in Small Groups - Social Influence in Groups

Social Influence in Groups

Work relevant to social influence in groups has a long history. Two early examples of social psychological research have been particularly influential. The first of these was by Muzafer Sherif in 1935 using the autokinetic effect. Sherif asked participants to voice their judgments of light movement in the presence of others and noted that these judgments tended to converge. The second of these was a series of studies by Solomon Asch, in which naive participants were asked to voice their judgments of the similarity of the length of lines after hearing the "judgments" of several confederates (research assistants posing as participants) who purposely voiced the same obviously wrong judgment. On about 1/3 of the cases, participants voiced the obviously wrong judgment. When asked why, many of these participants reported that they had originally made the correct judgment but after hearing the confederates, decided the judgments of several others (the confederates) should be trusted over theirs. As a consequence of these and other studies, social psychologists have come to distinguish between two types of social influence; informational and normative (see conformity). Informational influence occurs when group members are persuaded by the content of what they read or hear to accept an opinion; Sherif's study appears to be an example. Normative influence occurs when group members are persuaded by the knowledge that a majority of group members have a view. Normative influence should not be confused with compliance, which occurs when group members are not persuaded but voice the opinions of the group majority. Although some of the participants in the Asch studies who conformed admitted that they had complied, the ones mentioned above who believed the majority to be correct are best considered to have been persuaded through normative influence.