Social Impact theory was created by Bibb Latané in 1981 and consists of three basic rules. The first rule is that social impact is the result of social forces including the strength of the source of impact, the immediacy of the event, and the number of sources exerting the impact. The second rule is the psychosocial rule that says the amount of impact tends to increase as the number of sources increases. However, the most significant difference in impact exists between having 0 sources and having 1 source. The third rule is that the number of targets also affects social impact. The more targets of impact that exist, the less impact each individual target feels.
Read more about Social Impact Theory: Original Research, Subsequent Development, Contemporary Research, Further Reading
Famous quotes containing the words social, impact and/or theory:
“You may cut off the heads of every rich man now living—of every statesman—every literary, and every scientific authority, without in the least changing the social situation. Artists, of course, disappeared long ago as social forces. So did the church. Corporations are not elevators, but levellers, as I see them.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“Television does not dominate or insist, as movies do. It is not sensational, but taken for granted. Insistence would destroy it, for its message is so dire that it relies on being the background drone that counters silence. For most of us, it is something turned on and off as we would the light. It is a service, not a luxury or a thing of choice.”
—David Thomson, U.S. film historian. America in the Dark: The Impact of Hollywood Films on American Culture, ch. 8, William Morrow (1977)
“It makes no sense to say what the objects of a theory are,
beyond saying how to interpret or reinterpret that theory in another.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)