Social influence
Week 1
When we talk about social influence, it is when someone’s emotions,
opinions or behaviour is influenced by other people.
How does social influence differ from persuasion? It is kind of a thin line. In
general we talk about persuasion when you are using social influence
tactics intentionally to influence other people. Persuasion in its purest
form is an influence that is non-coercive (coercion = dwang) (you are not
putting a gun against someone’s head). Persuasion involves two or more
people and it is intentional. However, this is persuasion in the purest form.
Persuasion can also happen within the person. You are forcing yourself to
workout for example. It can also be unintentional to a certain extent, then
you influence somebody else using a tactic but you were not aware of it. It
can also be coercive in the sense that if a friend asks whether you can
help him or her move boxes all day, saying no is an option. There is no
bullet, however, there is a price to be paid. Maybe this person will like you
less or not invite you to a party. Although it is non-coercive, there is a
price so there is some coercion in there. So there is persuasion in it’s
purest forms, but sometimes the borders are a bit unclear.
Compliance gaining is me making a request to somebody else and then
using my social influence tactics to influence this person into actually
complying to that, saying yes to your request.
Automatic processes are processes that lack awareness, uncontrollable,
unintended. Very efficient way of processing information or getting to an
opinion. On the other hand there are controlled processes (answer which
colour is this is produced right away, asking what is 494 x 32 is not
produced right away). Controlled processes are intended and take a lot of
effort. So there are two processes we can think about to gather
information.
People often think they know what causes their behaviour but that is not
correct. For example, research shows if you go on a first date to a scary
movie, people tend to like the person more that they are going with
elevated heart rate gives you a similar feeling of being in love. Emotion is
evoked by the movie, but it is assumed that it is caused by the other
person.
Heuristics are decision strategies rules of thumb, educated guesses. In
a large part they are unconscious, they are automated choices. Highly
efficient.
People like a reason for a favour. Providing a reason would generate more
compliance to a request. Information giving reason is can I go first
because I am in a hurry. Saying can I go first because I have to make
copies does not add information, because you are in the line for a copy
,machine. The percentage that complied is 94 vs 93. So any kind of reason
makes people comply. The because is like a heuristic. It triggers a script.
You hear because, you think there is a reason coming, which makes
people go along. Even if the reason is nonsense. The because is almost
like a heuristic for complying. There however is a limit to which this works.
If the costs for the individual gets too high for going along, they tend to
rely more on this central processing effortful thinking about all the
arguments that are being provided and base their decision on that. People
then do listen past the because and pay attention to the reason that is
being provided. Then can I go first because I have to make copies and
need 20 pages does not longer work, can I go first because I am in a rush
and need 20 pages does work.
____
Contrast principle: when we make judgements on which we eventually
base our decisions, we often use reference points. What you choose as a
reference point will influence your judgment. If you have to decide how tall
someone is, whether you use a smurf or a basketball player will have an
influence on your judgement, because we tend to overestimate the
difference that we observe between the reference point and observation.
How can you use that in persuasion?
By basically influencing which reference point people take and use in their
decisions. For example with regard to price. If you sell something very
expensive first with a very high price, and then offer additional goods that
are far less expensive, the price seems lower.
This is what is often done by car salesmen. They sell you the car first and
then you get an additional package, they are quite pricey but not in the
light of the price of the car. If you use the contract principle this way, you
should first make a sell for the very expensive one, and then come up with
the additional aspects. Another example is real estate agents. First he
gives you an expensive terrible house with no light and rats. Anything
after that you will like, even if it is not a lot like what you had in mind.
Using reference points by adding alternatives. You have some money you
want to save. The bank offers two saving accounts: (1) you get 3.2 percent
interest, but cannot touch your money for 5 years. (2) 3.4 percent interest,
but you cannot touch your money for 10 years. The difference in years is
not compensated enough by the difference in interest. A bank was facing
this situation and asked a behavioural scientist to solve this problem by
making more people taking the second option. Create account (3) which
has an interest rate of 3.45, but you cannot touch your money for 15
years. Nobody will take this option, but in this light the second option looks
much better. For the original decision the reference point for 2 was 1, but
now you are using option 3 as a reference point to evaluate 2. This works
for a lot of things. You want to buy pants and care for comfort and looks,
they are equally important. By adding alternatives that are maybe not that
,interesting by itself, you can change the decision landscape and thereby
influence people into deciding other stuff.
A situation linked to this , where the alternatives present have influence
over our decisions and our judgement is compromise. You are sitting in a
restaurant on a first date and you want some wine to accompany your
meal. On the wine list number one is a very expensive wine, on the low
side we have a carton box wine, the middle option is more expensive than
the bottom but less than the first. People will most likely go for this. On the
one hand they like the more affordable option, so without the middle
option they would go for the cheap one. But by adding a middle one, they
tend to compromise. You pay a bit more but expect a bit more quality.
Chicken meat: you do not want to go for the one where they had the worst
life, but do not want to afford the one where they had a relatively nice life.
You go for the two stars. By adding a compromise alternative, you can
play around with the decision frame of the consumer and thereby steer
their behaviour.
____
Many people will when presented with two option choose the option that is
familiar to them as rating higher on that specific criteria that they are
asked for. This is called the similarity heuristic. When making judgments
we often compare the current situation to a previous experience that we
had. Where we have a disturbing experience or negative experiences then
we try to shy away from new experiences that quite line up to that. If you
have vomited after a roller coaster, you will stay away from amusement
parks. The same applies for positive experiences. If you like an actress
then you will more likely like other movies she plays in. Amazon etc uses
this to try to make you buy more things by purely picking on these movies
you apparently liked.
The simulation heuristic: the ease with which we can imagine
something is often used as a heuristic to determine its probability. This is
particularly the case in risk analysis. If you assess the risk of dying from a
shark vs dying from a snail bite, the latter might be a bit hard to imagine
and therefore becomes less likely in your perception. Whereas a shark
attack, particularly because all of the movies, can greatly raise our ability
to imagine this and thereby the probability. Another one is for example
regret is linked to this, to the ease which you can imagine the alternative
taking place: you have to catch a train, you are late, you run all the way
and while you ran into the platform, you see the train already left. This is
situation a. Situation b is where you run all the way and you see the doors
closing and the train leaving. In which of the situations would you feel
more regret. In b, because you could imagine that things would play out
differently, if just the traffic lights went green a little bit faster, you would
, have made it. This near miss is an enormous generator, based on
simulation heuristic for regret.
____
If you find money on the street you spend it more easily than the money
you have worked hard for. Money you worked hard for you will likely spend
on rational things. If it is money that is easily obtained than you would
spend it on easy hedonistic things, like a toy car. Effort is often used as a
heuristic almost to indicate how valuable something is: the effort you put
in obtaining it. This also holds true to more important things, for example
relationships: hard to get. Hard to get works by the same principle. If
someone plays hard to get you look back at all the effort you have put in
to this person and on the basis of that assume that you like this person
very much. ‘’If I did all that for this person, it must be the greatest person
ever’’. It has to be in hindsight you looking back at the effort you have
already put in. If it is at forehand and you look at all the effort you have to
get into to actually be with this person, you look at it very differently and
would probably say no.
Effort also has a negative effect when it comes to the process fire which
you have to interpret, think about arguments. If there are arguments
presented with a specific compliance request and it is very hard to follow
these arguments, you have to think very hard about it, the effort that is
involved in processing this information is often used as a heuristic to value
the argument in itself. Arguments that are easy to process are often rated
as more true. For example rhyme, why slogans with a certain rhyme are
more effective. They are more effective because they are very easy to
process. An example: two conditions, one group had to name one things
they liked about a car, the other group had to name 8. The group that had
to name more things they liked were afterwards less favourable about the
car. The effort that is involved in getting to all these things is used as an
indicator that you maybe like the car not so much. The people that only
had to name one thing were very positive.
Another field where easy to process plays a significant role in how
persuasive something is, is writing. If your handwriting is very sloppy, that
automatically makes the argument that you have written down less
persuasive. The same holds true with how you build up your sentences
and your text. Very complex writing is less persuasive than writing that is
easy to process.
People take the effort that is involved in processing the argument as a
indicator of how true and the argument in itself is, so the quality of the
argument.
____
