Social Impact Theory

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:

    There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.
    Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)

    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)

    The weakness of the man who, when his theory works out into a flagrant contradiction of the facts, concludes “So much the worse for the facts: let them be altered,” instead of “So much the worse for my theory.”
    George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)