ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on group influence, or how a group of people brings about changes in a single person or another group. There are two major schools of thought in the group influence field. Researchers who subscribe to mathematical models of group influence propose that group influence can be viewed as a function of several physical characteristics of groups, for instance, the number or importance of people who constitute the group. There are four models of group influence: social impact theory, self-attention theory, social physics, and the social influence model. Each of these theories of group influence assumes "force field" type influences, in which other people are presumed to exert their effects in ways analogous to physical stimuli. The relationship of own group to other group is represented by what is known as the Other-Total Ratio (OTR), which is somewhat simpler than the equation for social impact theory.