ABSTRACT
The study of social influence phenomena lies at the very heart of social psychology. Allport’s (1935) “classical” definition of social psychology as the study of how individuals are influenced by the real or imagined presence of others may be indicative of how crucial social psychologists have regarded influence for all aspects of social life. In fact, social influence occurs constantly. Consider our daily exposure to radio and television commercials, newspaper ads, direct requests, influence attempts by salespersons, politicians, and so forth. In a broader sense, influence by other individuals operates in many other forms of social interaction as well, including helping behavior, aggression, social loafing, social facilitation, leadership, obedience, prejudice, and many others. In the present chapter we start with a classic distinction between two types of social influence: normative and informational. We will then use this distinction as a guiding principle for reviewing developments in two major areas of research: social influence in groups, which is mostly captured in terms of minority and majority influence, and persuasion. This focus, necessary with regard to space constraints, has resulted in the omission of a number of other, equally important, approaches to social influence that are less congenial to the structure we decided to present – cf. Cialdini’s (1994) work on influence tactics (see also Cialdini, 2004), or Latané and Nowak’s (1994) application of catastrophe theory to social influence processes. We will conclude this chapter by arguing that abstractions from surface characteristics in social influence and persuasion and a focus on underlying principles can provide new insights and perspectives on the phenomena reported here.
