Social influence in groups: when individuals change their minds

When we talk about social influence we are referring to the study of the ways in which the public and private opinions and behaviors of individuals are influenced by other subjects.

The influence to conform…

As the discipline developed, social influence quickly became a hot topic for scholars, who divided themselves into two main schools of thought. The first, North American functionalism , holds that the possibility of influence is unequally distributed in society. Indeed, it always occurs from the top down, almost exclusively through the heterodox influence of the majority. Those in power can, in practice, influence others precisely through the coercion they are capable of exerting. Following this logic, therefore, it is easy to see how the idea of ​​influence tends to be attributable to conservative thought, that is, that set of ideas and programs that prioritize maintaining social order and regulatory control through processes of conformity.

…and the influence to change

The second line of thought, defined as genetic , proposed the idea that all individuals and groups could exert influence, even minorities, but under certain conditions. Contrary to popular belief, what makes influence possible is not so much the number or power possessed but rather the degree of coherence and effectiveness of the behavior used to exercise it. The goal towards which the social influence of minorities would tend would therefore not seem to be the maintenance of the status quo but perpetual social change.

Sherif's Experiment

The first studies on influenza analysed this phenomenon essentially within the social groupsThere are many of them, but it is worth mentioning just a few. The first one we want to mention is theSherif's autokinetic effect experimentAccording to the author, the autokinetic effect is an optical illusion. In a dark room, a point of light projected onto a screen gives the impression of oscillating even though it is actually stationary. The main variable that interested the researchers was the differences in evaluation manifested by the subjects in the situations in which they expressed their judgments. By first having the subjects evaluate the situation alone and then in a group, it was noted how the personal evaluation norm gradually disappeared, bringing the evaluation to an intermediate level between the personal and the group one, until a real collective norm.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyDVAcp_VMM

Ash's Experiment

The second study to remember was carried out 15 years after Sherif's, by Solomon AshAccording to the scholar, within social groups not all people would have the same probability of exercising influence: they are the majority opinions those potentially most influential. To empirically demonstrate this idea, Ash devised an experiment that, like Sherif's, required a perceptual judgment. Subjects were shown a sample line that had to be compared with three other lines of different shapes, differentiated by letters (ABC). Only one of those subjects, however, was a "naive" guinea pig who chose the line that most closely resembled the sample. The others, who were collaborators, deliberately chose a clearly different line.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXQaVA9kfiw

Naive and easily influenced?

Through this experiment, Ash observed the tendency of the "naive" actor to revise his response, highlighting oversights and errors he hadn't noticed, effectively modifying his judgment and aligning it with that of others . For Ash, therefore, influence does not appear to be the result of suggestion or irrational processes, but of a reasoning that in minority situations leads us to evaluate the majority's position as correct. This is also a psychological process called " informational influence ," alongside a second process called " normative influence ," which pushes us to respond publicly in a manner consistent with the expectations of other members of the group with which we are interacting.

Francesco D'Ambrosio