Social Influence and Change

• Social change occurs when societies (not just individual) adopt new attitudes and beliefs.
• Social change can happen because of the following steps: 1. drawing attention (social proof), 2. consistency (continuously displaying message), 3. deeper processing (new message for deeper thinking), 4. augmentation principle (acting in shocking way), 5. snowball effect (build up people who agree), 6. social cryptomnesia (people know change happened but don’t remember how).
• One weakness of social influence causing social change is there are barriers. Bashir et al investigated why people resist social change even if they agree. They found that people were reluctant to behave in an environmentally friendly way in fear of being seen as a “tree-hugger” and wanted to resist stereotypes of activist groups. This suggests social change is not as easy as following the steps, another key factor is not to be off-putting, suggesting it is more complex than the steps suggest. (PEEL)
• Nolan et al investigated whether social influence process lead to a reduction in energy consumption. They hung messages on front doors in San Diego every week for a month with the message that most residents were trying to reduce their usage. As a control, some residents had a different message that asked them to save but didn’t reference other’s behaviour. They found a significant decrease in energy usage of the first group.