HOW GROUPS INFLUENCE THEIR MEMBERS
We have seen how the presence of other people can make us less inclined to help someone, and how other people can persuade us to obey their orders. Groups can also exert enormous influence on individuals through the medium of norms (Turner, 1991).
Group norms
Although group norms are relatively enduring, they do change in line with changing circumstances to prescribe attitudes, feelings and behaviours that are appropriate for group members in a particular context. Norms relating to group loyalty and central aspects of group life are usually more specific, and have a more restricted range of acceptable behaviour than norms relating to more peripheral features of the group. High-status group members also tend to be allowed more deviation from group norms than lower-status members (Sherif & Sherif, 1964).
Sherif (1935, 1936) carried out one of the earliest, and still most convincing, demonstrations of the impact of social norms, deliberately using an ambiguous stimulus. He placed participants alone or in groups of two or three in a completely darkened room. At a distance of about 5 m, a single and small stationary light was presented to them. In the absence of reference points, the light appeared to move rather erratically in all directions – aperceptual illusion known as the autokinetic effect.
Sherif asked his participants to call out an estimate of the extent of movement of the light, obviously without informing them of the autokinetic effect. Half of the participants made their first 100 judgements alone. On three subsequent days they went through three more sets of trials, but this time in groups of two or three. For the other half of the participants, the procedure was reversed. They underwent the three group sessions first and ended with a session alone.
Participants who first made their judgements alone developed rather quickly a standard estimate (a personal norm) around which their judgements fluctuated. This personal norm was stable within individuals, but it varied highly between ndividuals. In the group phases of the experiment, which brought together
people with different personal norms, participants’ judgements converged towards a more or less common position – a ‘group norm’. With the reverse procedure employed with the other half of the participants, this group norm developed in the first session and persisted into the later session, when participants were evaluated alone.
The funnel effect in the left panel reveals the convergence in the (median) udgements of three participants who first judged alone (session I) then later on in each other’s presence (sessions II, III and IV). The right panel shows the udgements of a group of three participants who went through the procedure in the reverse order (i.e. first judged together, then alone). Here the group convergence is already present in the first session, and there is no sign of funnelling out in
the final ‘alone’ session. In subsequent studies, Sherif found that, once stablished, this group norm persisted, and that it strongly influenced the estimations of new members of the group.
In another study, Jacobs and Campbell (1961) used a group of confederates who unanimously agreed upon a particular judgement. After every 30 judgements, they replaced a confederateby a naive participant until the whole group was made up of naive participants. Their results indicated that the norm had a significant effect on the naive participants’ judgements, even after all the confederates had been removed from the judgement situation.
Muzafer Sherif (1906–78) made ground-breaking contributions to the psychology of attitudes, the study of group norms and intergroup relations. Born in Izmir, Turkey, he took a higher degree at Harvard and spent most of his life as professor at the University of Oklahoma. His research work on the development of group norms (using the autokinetic phenomenon) showed that other group members provide us with a frame of reference – especially, but not only, when stimuli are ambiguous. His Robber’s Cave study demonstrated the powerful impact of goals on intergroup relations, and showed that group conflict is easier to induce than reduce. This research contributed to the development of his Realistic Group Conflict Theory.
We have seen how the presence of other people can make us less inclined to help someone, and how other people can persuade us to obey their orders. Groups can also exert enormous influence on individuals through the medium of norms (Turner, 1991).
Group norms
Although group norms are relatively enduring, they do change in line with changing circumstances to prescribe attitudes, feelings and behaviours that are appropriate for group members in a particular context. Norms relating to group loyalty and central aspects of group life are usually more specific, and have a more restricted range of acceptable behaviour than norms relating to more peripheral features of the group. High-status group members also tend to be allowed more deviation from group norms than lower-status members (Sherif & Sherif, 1964).
Sherif (1935, 1936) carried out one of the earliest, and still most convincing, demonstrations of the impact of social norms, deliberately using an ambiguous stimulus. He placed participants alone or in groups of two or three in a completely darkened room. At a distance of about 5 m, a single and small stationary light was presented to them. In the absence of reference points, the light appeared to move rather erratically in all directions – aperceptual illusion known as the autokinetic effect.
Sherif asked his participants to call out an estimate of the extent of movement of the light, obviously without informing them of the autokinetic effect. Half of the participants made their first 100 judgements alone. On three subsequent days they went through three more sets of trials, but this time in groups of two or three. For the other half of the participants, the procedure was reversed. They underwent the three group sessions first and ended with a session alone.
Participants who first made their judgements alone developed rather quickly a standard estimate (a personal norm) around which their judgements fluctuated. This personal norm was stable within individuals, but it varied highly between ndividuals. In the group phases of the experiment, which brought together
people with different personal norms, participants’ judgements converged towards a more or less common position – a ‘group norm’. With the reverse procedure employed with the other half of the participants, this group norm developed in the first session and persisted into the later session, when participants were evaluated alone.
The funnel effect in the left panel reveals the convergence in the (median) udgements of three participants who first judged alone (session I) then later on in each other’s presence (sessions II, III and IV). The right panel shows the udgements of a group of three participants who went through the procedure in the reverse order (i.e. first judged together, then alone). Here the group convergence is already present in the first session, and there is no sign of funnelling out in
the final ‘alone’ session. In subsequent studies, Sherif found that, once stablished, this group norm persisted, and that it strongly influenced the estimations of new members of the group.
In another study, Jacobs and Campbell (1961) used a group of confederates who unanimously agreed upon a particular judgement. After every 30 judgements, they replaced a confederateby a naive participant until the whole group was made up of naive participants. Their results indicated that the norm had a significant effect on the naive participants’ judgements, even after all the confederates had been removed from the judgement situation.
Muzafer Sherif (1906–78) made ground-breaking contributions to the psychology of attitudes, the study of group norms and intergroup relations. Born in Izmir, Turkey, he took a higher degree at Harvard and spent most of his life as professor at the University of Oklahoma. His research work on the development of group norms (using the autokinetic phenomenon) showed that other group members provide us with a frame of reference – especially, but not only, when stimuli are ambiguous. His Robber’s Cave study demonstrated the powerful impact of goals on intergroup relations, and showed that group conflict is easier to induce than reduce. This research contributed to the development of his Realistic Group Conflict Theory.
Conformity
Sherif ’s autokinetic experiments show how norms develop and influence people – but the actual process through which people conform is less obvious. The participants in Sherif’s study were publicly calling out their estimates of a highly ambiguous stimulus. Perhaps they were worried about looking foolish, or were simply uncertain. People may have conformed for one of two reasons, each linked to a distinct form of social influence (Deutsch & Gerard, 1955):
1. They may have been concerned about social evaluation (e.g. being liked or being thought badly of ) by the others in the group (normative influence).
2. They may have used the other group members’ judgements as useful information to
guide them in an ambiguous task on which they had no previous experience informational influence).
A series of experiments by Asch (1951, 1952, 1956) tried to rule out informational influence by using clearly unambiguous stimuli. In his first study, Asch invited students to participate in an experiment on visual discrimination. Their task was simple enough: they would have to decide which of three comparison lines was equal in length to a standard line. On each trial, onecomparison line was equal in length to the standard line, but the other two were different.
The task was apparently very easy: a control group (who made their judgements in isolation) made almost no errors, ruling out the informational influence component of this study. In the experimental condition, participants were seated in a semicircle and requested to give their judgements aloud, in the order in which they were seated, from position 1 to position 7. In fact, there was only one real participant, seated in position 6. All the other ‘participants’ were in fact confederates of the experimenter who, on each trial, unanimously gave a predetermined answer. On six ‘neutral’ trials (the first two trials and four other trials distributed over the remaining set), the confederates gave correct answers. On the other 12 ‘critical’ trials, the confederates unanimously agreed on a predetermined, incorrect line. The neutral trials, particularly the first two trials, were added to avoid suspicion on the part of the real participant, and to ensure that the confederates’ responses were not attributed to poor eyesight by the participant. Like Milgram’s obedience study, this paradigm had a tangible impact on the real participants. They showed signs of being uncomfortable and upset, gave the experimenter and the other participants nervous looks, sweated nervously and gesticulated in vain. The results reveal the powerful influence of an obviously incorrect but unanimous majority on the judgements of a lone participant. In comparison with the control condition (which yielded only 0.7 per cent errors), the experimental participants made almost 37 per cent errors. Not every participant made that many errors, but only about 25 per cent of Asch’s 123 participants did not make a single error. Presumably, conformity was produced through normative social influence operating in the line judgement task.
Subsequent Asch-type experiments have investigated how majority influence varies ver a range of social situations (e.g. Allen, 1975; Wilder, 1977). These studies found that conformity reaches full strength with three to five apparently independent sources of influence. Larger groups of independent sources are not stronger, which perhaps runs counter to our intuitions, and non-independent sources (e.g. several members of the samecoalition or subgroup) are seemingly treated as a single source.
Conformity is significantly reduced if the majority is not unanimous. Dissenters and deviates of almost any type can produce this effect. For example, Allen and Levine (1971) showed that conformity is even reduced by a deviate who has visibly thick lenses in his glasses, although this ‘invalid’ supporter had much less impact than a ‘valid’ supporter with no glasses.
Solomon E. Asch (1907–96) was born in Warsaw, Poland, and received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in the United States, where he was influenced by Wertheimer and the Gestalt approach. He taught at Swarthmore College for 19 years, and is best known for his famous experiments on conformity (or ‘Group forces in the modification and distortion of judgements’). These studies show that most people succumb to the pressure to conform to majority opinion, even when stimuli are unambiguous. Asch influenced many subsequent social psychologists and their research, including Milgram’s classic studies of obedience, and wrote a distinctive and authoritative textbook on Social Psychology, first published in 1952 and reprinted in 1987.
Minority influence
For most of us, conformity means coming into line with majority attitudes and behaviours.
But what about minority influence?
Minorities face a social influence challenge. By definition, they have relatively few members; they also tend to enjoy little power,can be vilified as outsiders, hold ‘unorthodox’ opinions, and have limited access to mainstream mass communication channels. And yet minorities often prevail, bringing about social change. Research suggests that minorities must actively create and accentuate conflict to draw attention to themselves and achieve influence (Moscovici, 1976; Mugny, 1982). Members of the majority may be persuaded to move in the direction of the minority, in order to reduce the conflict they provoke. To have an impact, minorities need to present a message that is consistent across group members and through time, but not rigidly presented. Minorities are also more effective if they appear to be acting on principle and making personal sacrifices for their beliefs. These strategies disrupt majority consensus and raise uncertainty, draw attention to the minority as a group that is committed to its perspective, and convey a coherent alternative viewpoint that challenges the dominant majority views. It also helps if the minority can present itself as an ingroup for the majority. For example, you might be opposed to increased tuition fees at university. But a minority of students from your own university (an ingroup minority) could conceivably win you round by arguing that such fees would provide bursaries for less well-off students.
The film Twelve Angry Men provides a dramatic fictitious example of how minority influence occurs. Twelve jurors have to decide over the guilt or innocence of a young man charged with the murder of his father. At the outset, all but one of the jurors are convinced of the youth’s guilt. The lone juror (played by Henry Fonda) actively attempts to change their minds, standing firm, committed, self-confident and unwavering. One by one the other jurors change sides, until in the end they all agree that the accused is not guilty. Other examples of minority influence include Bob Geldof’s Band Aid movement to raise money for famine relief, and new forms of music and fashion.
Moscovici (1980) proposed a dual-process theory of majority/minority influence. He suggested that people conform to majority views fairly automatically, superficially and without much thought because they are informationally or normatively dependent on the majority.
In contrast, effective minorities influence by conversion. The deviant message achieves little influence in public, but it is processed systematically to produce influence (e.g. attitude change) that emerges later, in private and indirectly. Subsequent research has demonstrated minority influence occurring after the main part of the experiment has finished, i.e. later, revealed by written answers rather than spoken responses, i.e. in private, and on indirectly related issues as opposed to the target issue, e.g. attitude change regarding euthanasia, following direct influence on the topic of abortion (see Wood et al., 1994).
Support for Moscovici’s dual-process theory is mixed. Using the framework of cognitive theories of persuasion (see discussion of the ‘elaboration likelihood model’ in chapter 17), it appears that both minorities and majorities can instigate either superficial or systematic processing of their message, depending onsituational factors and constraints. But overall, the weight of evidence is tipped slightly towards oscovici’s claim that minorities instigate deeper processing of their message (see Martin & Hewstone, 2003a, b). Nemeth (1986, 1995) proposed that minorities induce more divergent thinking thinking beyond a focal issue), whereas majorities induce more convergent thinking (concentrating narrowly on the focal issue). Evidence supporting this contention reveals that exposure to a consistent, dissenting minority leads to generation of more creative and novel judgements or solutions to problems, use of multiple strategies in problem solving, and better performance on tasks that benefit from divergent thinking (Nemeth & Kwan, 1987). In contrast, convergent thinking induced by majorities tends to lead to mere imitation of the belief or course of action that is proposed by the majority source.
Sherif ’s autokinetic experiments show how norms develop and influence people – but the actual process through which people conform is less obvious. The participants in Sherif’s study were publicly calling out their estimates of a highly ambiguous stimulus. Perhaps they were worried about looking foolish, or were simply uncertain. People may have conformed for one of two reasons, each linked to a distinct form of social influence (Deutsch & Gerard, 1955):
1. They may have been concerned about social evaluation (e.g. being liked or being thought badly of ) by the others in the group (normative influence).
2. They may have used the other group members’ judgements as useful information to
guide them in an ambiguous task on which they had no previous experience informational influence).
A series of experiments by Asch (1951, 1952, 1956) tried to rule out informational influence by using clearly unambiguous stimuli. In his first study, Asch invited students to participate in an experiment on visual discrimination. Their task was simple enough: they would have to decide which of three comparison lines was equal in length to a standard line. On each trial, onecomparison line was equal in length to the standard line, but the other two were different.
The task was apparently very easy: a control group (who made their judgements in isolation) made almost no errors, ruling out the informational influence component of this study. In the experimental condition, participants were seated in a semicircle and requested to give their judgements aloud, in the order in which they were seated, from position 1 to position 7. In fact, there was only one real participant, seated in position 6. All the other ‘participants’ were in fact confederates of the experimenter who, on each trial, unanimously gave a predetermined answer. On six ‘neutral’ trials (the first two trials and four other trials distributed over the remaining set), the confederates gave correct answers. On the other 12 ‘critical’ trials, the confederates unanimously agreed on a predetermined, incorrect line. The neutral trials, particularly the first two trials, were added to avoid suspicion on the part of the real participant, and to ensure that the confederates’ responses were not attributed to poor eyesight by the participant. Like Milgram’s obedience study, this paradigm had a tangible impact on the real participants. They showed signs of being uncomfortable and upset, gave the experimenter and the other participants nervous looks, sweated nervously and gesticulated in vain. The results reveal the powerful influence of an obviously incorrect but unanimous majority on the judgements of a lone participant. In comparison with the control condition (which yielded only 0.7 per cent errors), the experimental participants made almost 37 per cent errors. Not every participant made that many errors, but only about 25 per cent of Asch’s 123 participants did not make a single error. Presumably, conformity was produced through normative social influence operating in the line judgement task.
Subsequent Asch-type experiments have investigated how majority influence varies ver a range of social situations (e.g. Allen, 1975; Wilder, 1977). These studies found that conformity reaches full strength with three to five apparently independent sources of influence. Larger groups of independent sources are not stronger, which perhaps runs counter to our intuitions, and non-independent sources (e.g. several members of the samecoalition or subgroup) are seemingly treated as a single source.
Conformity is significantly reduced if the majority is not unanimous. Dissenters and deviates of almost any type can produce this effect. For example, Allen and Levine (1971) showed that conformity is even reduced by a deviate who has visibly thick lenses in his glasses, although this ‘invalid’ supporter had much less impact than a ‘valid’ supporter with no glasses.
Solomon E. Asch (1907–96) was born in Warsaw, Poland, and received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in the United States, where he was influenced by Wertheimer and the Gestalt approach. He taught at Swarthmore College for 19 years, and is best known for his famous experiments on conformity (or ‘Group forces in the modification and distortion of judgements’). These studies show that most people succumb to the pressure to conform to majority opinion, even when stimuli are unambiguous. Asch influenced many subsequent social psychologists and their research, including Milgram’s classic studies of obedience, and wrote a distinctive and authoritative textbook on Social Psychology, first published in 1952 and reprinted in 1987.
Minority influence
For most of us, conformity means coming into line with majority attitudes and behaviours.
But what about minority influence?
Minorities face a social influence challenge. By definition, they have relatively few members; they also tend to enjoy little power,can be vilified as outsiders, hold ‘unorthodox’ opinions, and have limited access to mainstream mass communication channels. And yet minorities often prevail, bringing about social change. Research suggests that minorities must actively create and accentuate conflict to draw attention to themselves and achieve influence (Moscovici, 1976; Mugny, 1982). Members of the majority may be persuaded to move in the direction of the minority, in order to reduce the conflict they provoke. To have an impact, minorities need to present a message that is consistent across group members and through time, but not rigidly presented. Minorities are also more effective if they appear to be acting on principle and making personal sacrifices for their beliefs. These strategies disrupt majority consensus and raise uncertainty, draw attention to the minority as a group that is committed to its perspective, and convey a coherent alternative viewpoint that challenges the dominant majority views. It also helps if the minority can present itself as an ingroup for the majority. For example, you might be opposed to increased tuition fees at university. But a minority of students from your own university (an ingroup minority) could conceivably win you round by arguing that such fees would provide bursaries for less well-off students.
The film Twelve Angry Men provides a dramatic fictitious example of how minority influence occurs. Twelve jurors have to decide over the guilt or innocence of a young man charged with the murder of his father. At the outset, all but one of the jurors are convinced of the youth’s guilt. The lone juror (played by Henry Fonda) actively attempts to change their minds, standing firm, committed, self-confident and unwavering. One by one the other jurors change sides, until in the end they all agree that the accused is not guilty. Other examples of minority influence include Bob Geldof’s Band Aid movement to raise money for famine relief, and new forms of music and fashion.
Moscovici (1980) proposed a dual-process theory of majority/minority influence. He suggested that people conform to majority views fairly automatically, superficially and without much thought because they are informationally or normatively dependent on the majority.
In contrast, effective minorities influence by conversion. The deviant message achieves little influence in public, but it is processed systematically to produce influence (e.g. attitude change) that emerges later, in private and indirectly. Subsequent research has demonstrated minority influence occurring after the main part of the experiment has finished, i.e. later, revealed by written answers rather than spoken responses, i.e. in private, and on indirectly related issues as opposed to the target issue, e.g. attitude change regarding euthanasia, following direct influence on the topic of abortion (see Wood et al., 1994).
Support for Moscovici’s dual-process theory is mixed. Using the framework of cognitive theories of persuasion (see discussion of the ‘elaboration likelihood model’ in chapter 17), it appears that both minorities and majorities can instigate either superficial or systematic processing of their message, depending onsituational factors and constraints. But overall, the weight of evidence is tipped slightly towards oscovici’s claim that minorities instigate deeper processing of their message (see Martin & Hewstone, 2003a, b). Nemeth (1986, 1995) proposed that minorities induce more divergent thinking thinking beyond a focal issue), whereas majorities induce more convergent thinking (concentrating narrowly on the focal issue). Evidence supporting this contention reveals that exposure to a consistent, dissenting minority leads to generation of more creative and novel judgements or solutions to problems, use of multiple strategies in problem solving, and better performance on tasks that benefit from divergent thinking (Nemeth & Kwan, 1987). In contrast, convergent thinking induced by majorities tends to lead to mere imitation of the belief or course of action that is proposed by the majority source.
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