Informational social influence and product quality judgments.

Eight groups of 15 college females each rated the quality of 1 paper plate while exposed to simulated quality evaluations of other raters. Others' evaluations were manipulated by presenting the modal evaluation as higher or lower than the control (no influence) mean rating and by varying the uniformity of others' ratings at 2 levels of dispersion. The availability of intrinsic (product composition) cues during prerating examination of the plate was manipulated by making available, or withholding, 2 comparison plates. Others' modal evaluations significantly affected the Ss' quality ratings of the plate. This effect was substantially stronger when others' evaluations were more uniform. The presence or absence of comparison plates had no effect on the influence conditions. Results are interpreted, in conjunction with those of J. B. Cohen and E. Golden (see record 1972-11926-001) as providing support for the effect of informational social influence on ratings of product quality. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Informational influence as a determinant of perceived task characteristics and job satisfaction.

Task characteristics and informational cues about the task were manipulated in a laboratory investigation of the impact of objective task design and informational influence in determining employees' perceptions of task characteristics and job satisfaction. Although a manipulation check involving 33 control Ss confirmed differences between the 2 experimental tasks (enriched and unenriched), results of the experiment with 42 graduate business students showed the major determinant of perceptions of task characteristics (Job Diagnostic Survey—JDS—and the Job Characteristic Inventory) and job satisfaction (JDS) to be informational influence in the form of cues about the task as either enriched or unenriched. Findings suggest that (a) job characteristics may be socially constructed as well as objective realities and that (b) perceptual measures of task dimensions may be susceptible to bias from informational cues. (39 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Gender and social influence: A social psychological analysis.

Men and women are believed to differ in how influential and easily influenced they are: Men are thought to be more influential, and women more easily influenced. In natural settings, men and women tend to differ in these ways, but these differences stem largely from formal status inequalities by which men are more likely than women to have high-status roles. Status is important because of the legitimate authority vested in high-status roles. Within appropriate limits, people of higher status are believed to have the right to make demands of those of lower status, and people of lower status are expected to comply with these demands. Yet, small, stereotypic sex differences in leadership and social influence generally have been found in laboratory experiments and other small-group settings where men and women have equal formal status. These small sex differences may occur because experience with hierarchical social structures in which men have higher status creates expectancies about male and female behavior, and these expectancies affect social interaction in ways that foster behavior that confirms the expectancies. Sex differences that occur in the laboratory as well as natural settings may stem from social structural factors—namely, from the existing distributions of women and men into social roles. (77 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Intragroup social influence and intergroup competition.

Three experiments examined the role of intragroup social influence in intergroup competition. In the context of a mutual fate control situation, participants in Exp 1 demonstrated more intergroup competition in the presence than in the absence of social support for shared self-interest. Exp 2 revealed that, in the context of a Prisoner's Dilemma Game, this social support effect was stronger when noncorrespondence of outcomes between the interacting groups was low than when it was high. Results from Exp 3 were consistent with the possibility that the effect of social support is attenuated when noncorrespondence of outcomes is high because under these circumstances intergroup competition is prescribed by a norm of group interest. The implications of these findings for understanding the antecedents of interindividual-intergroup discontinuity are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Pervasive influence of social schemata.

Ss placed human figures cut from felt on a field under free response instructions and then reconstructed displays of the figures in a judgment task where the figures were presented with a fixed separation and replaced by the Ss. Next the Ss attempted to replace human statuettes while blindfolded. Finally, a word association test was administered. Those Ss who kept man and woman figures together in free placements made the largest errors of replacing man-woman pairs of figures closer together than they replaced other pairs in both the visual and nonvisual reconstructions. These Ss were significantly more likely to give "man" and "woman" as reciprocal verbal associations. The same social schema was aroused by the specific social content whether the stimuli were visual, nonvisual, or verbal. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The influence of social environment and social image on adolescent smoking.

This purpose of this article is to explore differences by gender and school grade in patterns of association among social influences and tobacco use. Data from the 1999 (N = 15,038) and 2000 (N 35,828) National Youth Tobacco Survey (American Legacy Foundation, 1999, 2000), a nationally representative, repeated cross-sectional survey, were used in the analysis. The authors compared effects on adolescent smoking. Direct paths from social environment to current smoking increased from middle school to high school. Indirect paths with social image mediating this relationship revealed a smaller increase. The pattern was constant across subsamples. Social image of smokers mediated the influence of social environment on adolescent smoking. Social image had a greater effect on smoking among middle school boys and high school girls. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Neural components of social evaluation.

Evaluative responses appear to involve 2 seemingly distinct sets of processes: those that are automatically activated and others that are more consciously controlled. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, the authors investigated the brain systems associated with automatic and controlled evaluative processing. Participants made either evaluative (good-bad) or nonevaluative (past-present) judgments about famous names. Greater amygdala activity was observed for names rated as "bad" relative to those rated as "good," regardless of whether the task directly involved an evaluative judgment (good-bad) or not (past-present). Good-bad judgments resulted in greater medial and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) activity than past-present judgments. Furthermore, there was greater ventrolateral PFC activity in good-bad judgments marked by greater ambivalence. Together, these findings indicate a neural distinction between processes engaged for automatic and controlled evaluation. Whereas automatic processes are sensitive to simple valence, controlled processes are sensitive to attitudinal complexity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Group decision making and social influence: A social interaction sequence model.

Discusses the social interaction sequence (SIS) model, which represents the group decision-making process in terms of the sequential choice behavior—changes in preference and certainty—of group members. This model states that the probabilities of preference and certainty changes are related to the current distribution of opinion in the group. An application of the SIS model to a study of jury decision making (G. Strasser, 1977) is presented, and results of earlier empirical studies are predicted by a computer simulation version of the model. Shift and opinion change versions of the model are proposed, with both extensions incorporating the concept of a characteristic certainty distribution. Characteristic certainty distributions are used to examine the expected effects of group size and assigned-decision rule on members' confidence in a group's decision. (57 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Rater confidence and social influence in performance appraisals.

The influence of rater confidence on combined evaluations was examined when information from multiple sources was available. Confidence was related to evaluation extremity for novice raters when no other rater information was available. Information from multiple raters differentially affected the relationship between confidence and rating extremity. Evaluation information supplied by a highly confident, extreme rater significantly influenced evaluations from noninteracting novice raters but only minimally influenced evaluations from interacting novice raters. Among experts, raters seen as raising the greatest number of and the most persuasive arguments were most influential. The most accurate rater in a group had little effect on combined evaluations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Audience influence, social isolation, and speech.

80 children—selected as being either high or low on exhibitionism (an audience seeking tendency) and audience anxiety (a tendency to be anxious about performing before others) according to scores on 2 questionnaire scales—told stories to an adult either with or without prior exposure to a brief period of social isolation. It was found that isolated children who were high in audience anxiety told significantly shorter stories than nonisolated high anxiety children, while the stories of isolated and nonisolated low anxiety Ss did not differ in length. An analysis of length of speech according to exhibitionism level yielded no significant differences, but isolated high exhibitionism boys tended to speak at a faster rate than other groups. Boys also spoke significantly longer than girls. (17 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Reciprocal social influence of obese and normal-weight persons.

Measured the influence of obese and normal-weight models on the compliance of 64 obese and 64 normal-weight male undergraduates. Under the guise of an investigation of the effects of distraction on studying efficiency, Ss observed modeling or no modeling of compliance to a request for volunteers. Analysis of results suggested that the obese may not be generally more susceptible to social influence than normals, as might be predicted from S. Schachter's (1971) externality hypothesis. Both obese and normal Ss demonstrated a reciprocal influence on one another with greater imitation of different weight models than similar weight models. This finding is interpreted as resulting from attitudes toward obesity as a form of social deviance. (16 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Certainty of judgment and resistance to social influence.

The present note presents evidence on the importance of certainty, obtained under conditions where there are marked individual differences in reactions to a given stimulus and associated differences in certainty of judgment. The method involved the use of phenylthiourea (also known as phenylthiocarbamide), referred to as PTU. The subjects, Yale University upperclassmen, were told that we were trying to find out "whether there are absolute values for these tastes or whether there are individual differences in ratings of them." He was then given a form, asked to taste Label A, and instructed to give it a rating of 5 (average) on the scale of pleasantness. He was then asked to taste B and C, and to rate each one in relation to A. After rating B, he was asked to rate his certainty that B should be given the pleasantness rating he had given it. A similar procedure was followed for C. On the basis of these private judgments, the Ss were scheduled in 30 three-man groups, half composed of one taster and two nontasters and half, of two tasters and one nontaster. The instructions were similar to those used earlier, except that certainty ratings were not requested and the Ss were asked to announce their ratings publicly, each one first giving his rating of B, and then of C. Each time, the majority persons, whether tasters or nontasters, were asked to announce their ratings first. When it came his turn on B, the minority person usually found that the others had given ratings similar to his private ones. But on C, he found that their ratings were markedly different from his own evaluation. It was found that the effects of majority opinion were markedly different depending upon whether the minority persons were tasters or nontasters of PTU. The data suggest that this asymmetric effect, whereby nontasters are more susceptible to majority influence, may be attributable to the stronger reactions tasters have to PTU and the resulting greater certainty they have about their judgments of the substance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Susceptibility to hypnosis and susceptibility to social influence.

Measures of susceptibility to social influence were obtained from 80 male Ss through a persuasibility test (Janis), an influencibility test (Schachter), and an autokinetic test (Sherif). A test of hypnotic susceptibility followed; scores from personality inventories were also available. Factor analysis shows the hypnotic subscales to represent one factor ("primary suggestibility"), orthogonal to a bipolar factor represented largely by scores on the self-report inventories. Among the tests of social influence only the influencibility test showed a slight positive relationship to hypnosis. Birth-order relationships failed to confirm predictions based on Schachter's findings. (29 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Minority influence: A meta-analytic review of social influence processes.

A meta-analytic review of 97 minority influence experiments evaluated the processes by which sources advocating deviant, minority opinions exert influence. Minority impact was most marked on measures of influence that were private from the source and indirectly related to the content of the appeal and less evident on direct private influence measures and on public measures. This attenuated impact of minorities on direct private and public measures suggests that in response to normative pressures, recipients avoided aligning themselves with a deviant source. Mediator analyses revealed that minorities perceived as especially consistent in the advocacy of their views were especially influential. The relation between normative and informational pressures in the minority influence paradigm was discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Imitation in the interest of social influence.

Tested the possibility that imitation may be used as a means of social influence among 40 5th- and 6th-grade boys and girls. One member of each pair served as the model and the other as the S. Ss who were given an induction designed to motivate them to influence the model imitated the model significantly more than Ss who received no induction. Looking and smiling at the model was positively correlated with imitation for the social influence Ss, but not for the control Ss. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

How to influence social policy affecting children and families.

Discusses recent legislative trends in child and family policy, sociopolitical forces behind those trends, and ways in which pro-children's groups can affect ongoing or future legislation. The effects of budget cuts in federal funding for daycare, child nutrition, and child support programs are described. It is asserted that, to make significant progress affecting children and families, a broader coalition of children's groups, encompassing members of both political parties and the interests of children whose mothers work at home and whose mothers are part of the work force, must be formed. Strong and effective federal agencies are needed to provide the focal point for developing and implementing policy. (6 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Direct and indirect social influence on children's legal judgments.

Attempted to replicate the recent indirect influence phenomenon (H. D. Saltzstein et al, see record 1966-07558-001) with children and to demonstrate that direct influence declines with age while indirect influence increases with age. 176 3rd-8th graders from 2 parochial schools were required to make prison-sentence judgments based on tape recordings of 2 specially prepared criminal cases. Experimental Ss made initial judgments about sentence length in Case 1, were informed of the judge's sentence of 11 yrs and 6 mo, and made final decisions about sentence length. Experimental Ss then made decisions about sentence length for Case 2, were informed of the judge's sentence of 11 yrs 6 mo, and made final decisions about sentence length. Controls also made initial and final judgments for both cases but were not apprised of the judge's decision in either. Change from the initial to final sentence in Case 1 was the direct influence measure, while change from the initial sentence in Case 1 and Case 2 was the indirect influence measure. Data analysis revealed that there was a significant decline in direct influence with grade but no difference in indirect influence. Further research contrasting tests of indirect influence where the S either does or does not anticipate encounters with an influence agent is suggested. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Need for approval and susceptibility to unintended social influence.

Investigated the relationship between Ss' need for approval and their susceptibility to the subtle unintended influence of biased Es. 48 female undergraduates divided into high- and low-need-for-approval groups (on the basis of their Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability scale scores) were tested by 6 male Es. It was suggested that prior failures to find such a relationship were due to the absence during the programmed pretask interaction of E and S of cues which would be likely to arouse S's approval motivation and thereby make him more susceptible to E's influence. A single sentence designed to arouse S's motivation was thus inserted into the standard pretask instructions. Under these conditions, Ss high in need for approval demonstrated a significant susceptibility to E expectancy effects, while low-approval-motivation Ss did not. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)