social influence and social action

8/22/2019 Social Influence and Social Action

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Social Influence and Social Action


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Aspects of Social Influence

Social facilitation: the observation that the presence ofother people can influence how well we perform on a taskoften improving our performance. E.g., student do workmore faster when they work with others rather than alone.

Audience Effects : the way that people will often actdifferently when there others present or observing fromhow they would act if they are alone and unobserved.

Factors influencing audience effects

Evaluation: as if the audience consisted on experts rather

than students Size and status : people become more nervous infront of

larger people


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Theories of Audience Effect

High drive state: People performed life

sustaining tasks well but likely to make errors

in complex tasks which needs attention.

Distraction-Conflict theory.

Self-presentation theory.


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Social loafing

The observed tendency in some situations for

individuals to devote less effort to a group

task than they would give to the same task if

they were doing it on their own.

E.g., college students asked them to make

noise as much as they could. Students

produced far less noise when they were ingroup rather than alone.


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Roles and groups

Social role

A role or a social role is a set of connected behaviors,rights and obligations as conceptualised by actors in asocial situation. It is an expected or free or

continuously changing behaviour and may have a givenindividual social status or social position. E.g., if I gointo a library to look for a book, I know what kind ofbehavior I am expected to show, and I am likely toconform it.

Role expectations: expect from others. Social sanctions

Role models


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The Stanford prison study

Simulated the prison environment

21 male research participants who are

assessed as emotionally stable

9 of them acted as prisoner and rest were to

act as guards

After 5

th

day of experiment, it was halt due tosome psychological effects.

Thus social setting makes the role as well.


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Leadership

process of social influence in which one person canenlist the aid and support of others in theaccomplishment of a common task,(ChemersM.,1997).

Weber identified three sources of a leaders authority

Rational grounds refers that legal authority of theleader is the representative of legitimate patterns ofnormative rules.

Traditional grounds belief that the continuity of social

structures is important Charismatic grounds state that the character and social

recognition of a particular individual character isimportant for leadership


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Types of leaders

Two dimensions of leaderships

Consideration dimension is concerned with howthe leader relates to other people e.g., positive

relationship at work place. Initiative structure dimension is to do with how

the leader organises and structures the tasks forhis team.

It is suggested that interpersonally orientedsupervisor tended to have the most productivedepartments


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Situation-dependent leadership

Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard called, SituationalLeadership. The premise for Situational Leadership isthat there is not one single best form of leadership,but that it is dependent on the situation and on the

follower, and that successful situational leaders areable to adjust their leadership style to fit differentsituations and people accordingly. In situationalleadership, a majority of the emphasis is on thefollower, and uses what Hersey and Blanchard call

follower readiness as the basis for deciding whatstyle of leadership is the best fit.


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Fiedlers contingency theory

Emphasized how the effectiveness of the leaders style iscontingent on the overall situation.

Suggested two types of leader: task-centered(who have astheir prime concern carrying out the task itself)

relationship-centered (those who tend to accomplish thetask by developing good relationships with the group).

Both types can be effective if their leadership orientation fitsthe situation.

Depends on three factors, quality of the relationship of theleader with his subordinates, leaders formal position interms of power and resources that they can utilize forperforming the task and how structured the task itself is.


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Leadership style

Lewin investigated in 1939

seminal work on the influence of leadershipstyles and performance

The researchers evaluated the performance ofgroups of eleven-year-old boys under differenttypes of work climate.

In each, the leader exercised his influenceregarding the type of group decision making,praise and criticism (feedback), and themanagement of the group tasks (projectmanagement) according to three styles:authoritarian, democratic, and laissez-faire.


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Autocratic or authoritarian style

Under the autocratic leadership style, all

decision-making powers are centralized in the

leader, as with dictators.

Those boys who had authoritarian leader

tended to work independently and in

competition with one another. They didnt

help each other and only do work hard in thepresence of the leader.


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Participative or democratic style

The democratic leadership style favors

decision-making by the group. Such a leader

gives instructions after consulting the group.

Boys worked reasonably and consistently

under the presence of democratic leader. They

showed mutual coordination and cooperate

with each other.


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Laissez-faire or free rein style

A free-rein leader does not lead, but leaves the group

entirely to itself. Such a leader allows maximum freedomto subordinates; they are given a free hand in deciding theirown policies and methods.

Boys showed restlessness and quarrelsome and didnt domuch work at all.

Different situations call for different leadership styles. Inan emergency when there is little time to converge on anagreement and where a designated authority hassignificantly more experience or expertise than the rest ofthe team, an autocratic leadership style may be most

effective; however, in a highly motivated and aligned teamwith a homogeneous level of expertise, a more democraticor laissez-faire style may be more effective. The styleadopted should be the one that most effectively achievesthe objectives of the group while balancing the interests of

its individual members


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Vrooms decision-making model

How leaders make decisions.

Vroom and Yetton developed an approach to

leadership decision-making in which they

examined 7 characteristics of situations that

required decisions and examined which types

of leadership styles would be most

appropriate for each situation.


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Conformity

Conformity is the act of matching attitudes,beliefs, and behaviours to what individualsperceive is normal of their society or social group.

Sherif set up an experiment in which researchparticipants experienced the Autokinetic effect.

Conformity can occur in the presence of others,or when an individual is alone. For example,people tend to follow social norms when eating

or watching television, even when alone. Aschs Studies

Line judging task


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Which line is the longest?


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Conformity Cont. Harvard psychologist Herbert Kelman identified three

major types of social influence:

Compliance is public conformity, while possibly keepingone's own private beliefs.

Identification is conforming to someone who is likedand respected, such as a celebrity or a favorite uncle.

Internalization is accepting the belief or behavior andconforming both publicly and privately.

Minority influence Although conformity generally leads individuals to

think and act more like groups, individuals areoccasionally able to reverse this tendency and change

the people around them.


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Obedience

One can influence someone else behaviour isby issuing a command which they feel obligedto obey.

E.g., after the second world war, the nazicriminals who were put on trials they justdefend themselves by saying that I was onlyobeying orders.

Milgrams basic study

Hoflings study of obedience


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Milgrams basic study

It was a learning experiment. The paricipantswere asked to read out words for a pairedassociate task. When they made the mistake they

would receive the electric shock from theirteacher started from 15V to 450 V (Actually thiswas not the real shock). During the whole timethe research participants were supervised by an

experimenter who gave them verbal prodswhen they hesitated or objected. It was foundthat the obedience rate was high.


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Hoflings study of obedience

A real life study of obedience in hospital

setting. A staff nurse was instructed by thedoctor to administer an overdose to thepatient on phone. As the drug was notauthorized and that was a malpractice. On theother hand a nurse is supposed to obeyinstructions from the doctor.

Result showed that social pressure also

influence in a level of obedience which couldlead to a nurse performing a dangerous act,just by obeyingorders.


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Milgrams Agency theory

Proposed that the normal inhibition of aggressiontowards people, which occurs when people seethemselves as free, autonomous individuals,becomes suppressed when people seethemselves as agents acting on behalf of

someone else. The agentic state: in which people see

themselves as being the agents of others, and inwhich individual conscience does not operate.

The autonomous state: in which they see theiractions as voluntary and self-directed, and inwhich conscience is fully operative.


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Milgrams Agency theory

Milgram sees people as being trained into the agentic state from avery early age. E.g., a parent telling a child not to hit smallerchildren is partly encouraging the development of moral principles;but is also establishing the idea of obedience to authority.

He suggested that the agentic state manifests through number ofways like Tuning, the person becomes attuned to orders orinstructions received from the superiors.

People in agentic state also tend to redefine the meaning of thesituation, so that they can accept the explanation of their actionswhich is provided by the authority under which they are working.

Another effect of agentic shift is that people no longer feelresponsible for their actions, they just follow the command ofauthority.


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Moral strain

Moral strain developed when the experimenter

inflicted pain and high distressed among the learnere.g, they cried and issued demand Let me out ofhere.

Some research participant used the mechanism Denial

in order to minimize what was happening to theirvictims.

Avoidance:

Degree of involvement : help the learners by flippingof the switches or by focusing on the correct answer.

Buffers which reduce the level of moral strain. E.g.,physical distance ( the pilot of a bomber doesn't seethe people who are killed), social distance


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Rebellion against authority

Milgram also studied the reactions of thosewho disobeyed.

According to him, disobedience followed a

sequence that began with an inner doubt andthen gradually into clear dissent.

It is just like a psychological exit from the

agentic state and a return to the autonomousstate.


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Crowd behavior

Large masses of people like in shopping mall etc whichwe experience usually most of the time.

Crowd gain attention when people get together with acommon purpose.

Emile Durkhiem saw peaceful crowds as serving a

valuable social purpose: state funeral.Mob psychology

Crucial theory given by Le Bon, viewed crowds as inherentlypathological, acting according to primitive impulses andlacking in rationality or reasoning power.

Crowds easily get aroused and operate as viciousanimal. E.g., political overtones, tragically death offootball supporters in the crowd.


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Deindividuation

A loss of the personal identity.

Study of Zimbardo in which groups of college women

were asked to deliver electric shocks to another woman.

Half of them dressed in bulky lab coats and hoods which

hid their faces and were never referred to by name. halfwere normally dressed in their clothes. Found that the

deindividuated women were prepared to give shocks as

those given by the individually identified women.

Deiner proposed that deindividuation is reduced the self-awareness. When a person is a member of crowd feel no

restrain of social convections and act impulsively.

social influence and social action

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