Social Influence and its impact

This time I would like to share about a topic I have learnt in the lesson - Social Influence. As you may know, it is a popular topic and research area in social psychology. While social psychology adopts scientific method trying to understand how psychological measures (thoughts, feelings and behaviors) of human beings are influenced by others, social influence is basically about the way of individuals being changed and affected by other people.

Social influence can always be found or discovered in many human activities, especially within communities and groups. One of the common reasons would be the tendency of people to adjust to behave and think like others, which is also known as Conformity. Below I take the Asch’s experiment conducted in the lesson as an interesting example.

A blue line is given on the left-hand side and the class was asked to decide which line on the right (A, B or C) is the same in length. About 1/3 of the classmates was told beforehand of the purpose of the experiment and was instructed to pick a wrong choice (line C) when the experiment was conducted in the class later. At the time it started and that portion of classmates provided their answer, it was found that the remaining classmates would also follow their choice although they may be in doubt or even thought that answer was incorrect. This is a kind of conformity under peer pressure which was demonstrated successfully by the class and proved that people would be influenced to change their minds and believes in order to humor the group.

Social influence can change our minds in a short period of time. A famous instance would be the shortage of table salt after the explosion of nuclear plants caused by the earthquake in Fukushima of Japan last year. Since by that time there was a rumour that eating salt could prevent people from the harm of nuclear radiation, in which they feared after the incident occurred, some people went to purchase bags of table salt in supermarkets and groceries. The rumour was spread out and resulted in more people believing and rushing to buy dozens of table salt even though in my opinion, some of them thought it had no such effect at first. During the peak time, the price of a small bag of table salt had once been raised to around $10. From this we can see the power of social influence. The effect of social influence is multiplied nowadays by the Internet as information can be shared in a relatively more rapid speed. We therefore must intelligently filter what we read in the Internet, have a second thought and judge if it is really the truth before believing.

Besides, you may also notice that social influence is able to alter our habits unintentionally. In the 90s of last century, with the development of personal computers and the Internet, the public started using computers as a communication tool. ICQ, an instant text message software, was invented for people to chat with friends who even lived overseas. In view of its convenience to contact, the number of people adopted its service increased quickly in short time. This was also an example of social influence. The more your friends use any software or application to communicate, the more willing you are to install and use it. It is because you would like to keep in touch with your friends and do not want to be considered as ‘OUT-OF-DATE’ when most people are using it except you. After ICQ, we have MSN, xanga and now Facebook and Twitter. People change the application using time to time and social influence is undoubtedly one of the reasons for that. Obviously, despite the negative impact of social influence mentioned in the last paragraph, social influence can also change our lives into a better way as nowadays, communication with family and friends are much cheaper and easier!

References:
[1] Wikipedia, Social Psychology
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Psychological