Meike Noorlander
Summary lectures - Social
infuence, public communication
and advertising
Utrecht University – Lectures given by M.A. Strick
Lecture 1 – Introduction and infuencing automatic
behaviour
Social influence: when we infuence someone or when someone infuence us. In general, when we
change an individual’s thinking and/or behaviour. Even if this happens by accident, for example by
automatc imitaton.
Focus of this course: The deliberate provocaton of certain behaviour
Partcularly in advertsing and informaton
It is not easy to understand behaviour of people. We are biased, because we think about it.
- We overestmate the role of ratonal consideratons and conscious intentons
o "Why did you buy this product?"
- We underestmate the role of environmental factors
o Infuence of the social environment
o Context: tme of day, tme limits, pressure, emotons
Theory of planned behaviour: it implies that when people make decisions (behaviour), they do that
on basins of intentons. Because they want to do it or want to buy it. These intentons are based on
normatve beliefs, so what others wants you to do, or on control beliefs. So this will lead to some
kind of intenton.
Behavioral Attude towards
beliefs the behavior
Normatve beliefs Intenton
Subjectve norm Behavior
Perceived
Control beliefs Actual
behavioral control
behavioral
control
Beliefs Attudes Intentons Behavior
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, Meike Noorlander
Example smoking is unhealthy
But this theory happen not in real life, because there is a gap between intentons and behaviour. Not
all behaviour is based on intentons. So what are the other factors that play a role by our behaviour?
There must be something else.
"Thinking is to humans as swimming is to cats; they can do it but they'd prefer not to.” Daniel
Kahneman
People like efciency. Why do something where you have to think about? It is easy for them to take
the easy way.
Examples:
- Mississippi State University: gender, doors, separate
- New year goals
- Double the price of jewellery, because people think expensive is beter uality
Two reasons why we are so mindless:
1. We make thousands of decisions every day, from thousands of optons.
2. Limited atenton capacity (7 +/-2, Miller, 1956)
o More choices than we can deal with
o More choices than we want to deal with
Result
- We focus our atenton on only some of the informaton (trigger feature, Cialdini's book)
o Saves energy and, on average, is adaptve
o But sometmes also leads to mindless compliance
- E.g., Langer, 1978. Pushing in at the photocopier.
o "Excuse me, I have fve pages. May I use the Xerox machine?" 60% say yes
o ...because I'm in a rush." à 94%
o ...because I have to make some copies" à 93%
Trigger feature (Cialdini)
- Stmulus that repeatedly provokes the same response: click-zooom
- We are very sensitve for specifc things (triggers) in our environment that gives us
informaton and tells us what to do.
o E.g., your own ringtone, conductor's whistle
Cialdini's model: Infuencing behaviour instead of convincing people
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