SOCIAL INFLUENCE ARTICLES SUMMARY
Week 1 and 2
Article 1: Chapter 4: Fluency and Social influence (Petrova, Schwarz, & Song)
By describing an undesirable behaviour as common “there is vandalism every day”, this can
actually increase the frequency of it rather than reduce it.
Example: informing students about an illness that is becoming increasingly prevalent.
- When described with concrete symptoms (low energy level, muscle aches, frequent
headaches), students could easily imagine having the disease.
- When described with far fewer concrete symptoms (vague sense of disorientation,
malfunctioning nervous system), the difficulty of imagining having the disease
reduced its perceived likelihood.
Not only the content of thoughts generated prior to a judgement is important, but the
ease or difficulty of generating those thoughts and images also may be critical determinant
of later judgments and behaviour.
Fluency and social consensus: it sounds familiar, it must be popular
- If something seems familiar, we’ve probably heard or seen it before.
- People draw on the experience of familiarity but are insensitive to where this fluency
experience comes from.
Perceptions can be faulty and driven by fluency variables that are unrelated to
the actual frequency of the relevant opinion or behaviour.
Fluency and truth: It sounds familiar, it’s probably true
- Variables that facilitate fluent processing (repetition, rhyme) create the impression
that a statement is true.
Frequent repetition can increase the influence of a message beyond its effect on
attention and retention.
Can be a problem when we attempt to counter misleading information (false
rumours, myths, misleading ad claims)
Repeating misleading information before providing counterarguments is
therefore not always a good idea because, weeks later, people recognise the false
information again and they might be influenced by the familiarity of it.
Fluency and risk: It’s hard to pronounce, it must be dangerous
- Familiar options feel safer than unfamiliar ones.
We prefer the familiar vegetables over less familiar exotic ones because of the
risk of strange tastes or unknown allergens.
The same counts for technologies, investments, and activities.
- Those things that are difficult to pronounce are also more risky
Stocks with easy-to-pronounce symbols (KAR) outperformed stocks with difficult-
to-pronounce ticker symbols (RDO).
, Those stocks seemed less risky, giving them a short-term advantage (later
corrected once more information to the public was available).
Fluency and future expectations: it’s hard to imagine, it won’t happen
- The more difficult it is to imagine the behaviour, the less likely we think we are to
engage in it.
Fluency in creating mental images also affect how we estimate the likelihood of
undertaking specific actions, such as purchasing a product.
We for instance feel less vulnerable to a disease when we find it difficult to recall
relevant risk factors or to imagine the disease’s symptoms.
Finding it difficult to imagine that we might fail to achieve our goals increases our
expectations for success.
Fluency and expected effort: If it’s hard to read, it’s hard to do
- The experience of fluency can dramatically change one’s perceptions of the amount
of effort it would take to complete the task.
Exercises are perceived to take longer when printed in a difficult-to-read font.
People were less willing to incorporate the exercise into their daily routine when
it was presented in a difficult-to-read font.
- If we want people to adopt a new behaviour, it is important that our
recommendation is not only conceptually clear and easy to follow, but also
perceptually easy to process.
- Style your message not too much (PowerPoint), because it might become too difficult
to process.
Fluency and commitment: When giving people choice backfires
- Even when choices are limited to just two options, they frequently involve difficult
trade-offs: quality versus price, benefits versus risks, enjoyment versus effort.
- Experience of these difficulties can have various unintended consequences: lower
satisfaction with the decision process, people switch to different options later, and
reduced motivation and commitment to implement the choice.
Difficulty of choosing between writing an easy about an article that is short and
dull versus one that is longer and interesting causes participants to write poorer
essays than those who were just assigned one of the articles.
Fluency and liking: we like what’s easy on the mind
- The more often we see an object, the more we like it.
- We like a stimulus more when a preceding visual or semantic prime facilitates its
processing
We find a picture of a lock more beautiful when it was preceded by the word
“key”.
- Beauty and truth go hand in hand: intuitive judgements of beauty and truth are
based on the same input, namely the experience of fluent processing.
Fluency and processing style: do I need to think twice?
- Fluency shapes thought by influencing how carefully we consider the information at
hand:
, “How many animals of each kind did Moses take on he Ark?” Most people
answer “two”, despite knowing that the biblical actor was Noah.
When this question was presented in a difficult-to-read font, 40% of the readers
noticed the error, while only 7% did so when it was presented in an easy-to-read
font.
- On a theoretical level: fluency can influence judgement by (a) serving as a source of
information and (b) changing how information is represented and processed.
Article 2: Social Influence: Compliance and Conformity (Cialdini & Goldstein, 2003)
Review that covers recent developments in the social influence literature, focusing primarily
on compliance and conformity research.
1. Compliance = a particular kind of response – acquiescence – to a particular kind of
communication – a request.
- Explicit request can be the direct solicitation of funds in a door-to-door campaign for
charitable donations.
- Implicit request can be a political advertisement that touts the qualities of a
candidate without directly asking for a vote.
- BUT in both ways, the target does recognise that he or she is being urged to respond
in a desired way.
3 ways in which targets of influence techniques process information and
respond to requests:
Goal of accuracy
- People are motivated to achieve their goals in the most effective and rewarding
manner possible.
- One inaccurate perception, cognition, or behaviour could mean the difference
between getting a bargain and being duped.
A. Affect and arousal
- Focus on the effect of discrete emotions on targets’ cognition as well as the eventual
outcome of the influence attempt.
- Targets use their feelings as cues for effective responding.
Individuals avoid feelings of shame and fear via public compliance, and guilt and
pity via private compliance.
- Forgas (1980): Affect Infusion Model (AIM) = used to explain the conditions under
which affect mediates the processing of and responses to requests.
An individual’s affective state is likely to be integrated into the processing of the
request in situations that call for constructive elaboration of “the available
stimulus information, require the activation and use of previous knowledge
structures, and result in the creation of new knowledge from the combination of
stored information and new stimulus details”.
Processing of a request will be more sensitive to mood if the appeal is
unconventional.
- Dollinski & Nawrat (1998): Fear-then-relief procedure
