384 Social Influence and Group Dynamics
OVERVIEW OF CHAPTER
Because social influence is deeply embedded in every aspect
of interpersonal functioning, any attempt to discuss it apart
from all the topics and research traditions defining social psy-
chology is necessarily incomplete and potentially mislead-
ing. How can one divorce a depiction of basic influence
processes from such phenomena as attitude change, self-
concept malleability, or the development of close relation-
ships? As it happens, of course, any field of scientific inquiry
is differentiated into relatively self-contained regions, and
social psychology is no exception. Although it can be ar-
gued that one person’s practical differentiation is another
person’s unnecessary fragmentation (see, e.g., Gergen, 1985;
Vallacher & Nowak, 1994), it is nonetheless the case that dis-
tinct theoretical and research traditions have emerged over
the years to create a workable taxonomy of social psycholog-
ical phenomena. Despite the pervasive nature of social influ-
ence, then, it is commonly treated as a separate topic in
textbooks and secondary source summaries of relevant the-
ory and research. To an extent, our treatment of social influ-
ence works within the accepted boundary conditions. Thus,
we discuss such agreed-upon subtopics as compliance, con-
formity, and obedience to authority. At the same time, how-
ever, we attempt to impose a semblance of theoretical order
on the broad assortment of relevant processes. So although
each manifestation of influence—whether in advertising, the
military, or intimate relationships—taps correspondingly dis-
tinct psychological mechanisms, there are certain invariant
features that transcend the surface structure of social influ-
ence phenomena.
We begin by discussing the exercise of external control to
influence people’s thoughts and behaviors. Rewards and pun-
ishments have self-evident efficacy in controlling behavior
across the animal kingdom, so their incorporation into influ-
ence techniques in human affairs is hardly surprising. We
then turn our attention to less blatant strategies of influence
that typically fare better in inducing sustained changes in
people’s thought and behavior. It is noteworthy in this regard
that the lion’s share of the literature subsumed under the so-
cial influence label emphasizes subtle manipulation rather
than direct attempts at control. We provide an overview of the
principal manipulation techniques and abstract from them
common features that are responsible for their relative
success. This theme provides the foundation for an even less
blatant approach to influence, one centering on the coordina-
tion of people’s internal states and overt behaviors. People
have a natural tendency to bring their beliefs, preferences,
and actions in line with those of the people around them, and
this tendency becomes manifest in the absence of overt or
subtle manipulation strategies. This penchant for interper-
sonal synchronization is what enables a mere collection of
individuals to become a functional unit defining a higher
level of social reality.
We then turn our attention to the manifestation of social
influence at the level of society. A central theme here is that
the emergence and maintenance of macrolevel properties in
a social system can be understood in terms of the mi-
crolevel influence processes described in the preceding
sections. We describe the results of computer simulations
demonstrating this linkage between different levels of so-
cial reality. In a concluding section, we abstract what appear
to be the common features of influence across different top-
ics and relate them to fundamental psychological processes,
chief among them the coordination of individual elements
to create a coherent higher-order unit. Our suggestions in
this regard are as much heuristic as integrative, and we offer
suggestions for future lines of theoretical work to forward
this agenda.EXTERNAL CONTROLThe most elemental way to influence someone’s behavior is
make rewards and punishments contingent on the enactment
of the behavior. For the better part of the twentieth century,
experimental psychology was essentially defined in terms of
this perspective, and during this era a wide variety of rein-
forcement principles were generated and validated. Attempts
to extend these principles to social psychology were always
complicated by the undeniable cognitive capacities of hu-
mans and the role of such capacities in regulating behavior
(cf. Bandura, 1986; Zajonc, 1980). Nonetheless, several lines
of research based on behaviorist assumptions are represented
in social psychology (e.g., Byrne, 1971; Staats, 1975). With
respect to social influence, this perspective suggests simply
that people are motivated to do things that are associated with
the attainment of pleasant consequences or the avoidance of
unpleasant consequences. Thus, people adopt new attitudes,
develop preferences for one another, change the frequency of
certain behaviors, or take on new activities because they in
effect have been trained to do so. It’s fair to say this perspec-
tive never achieved mainstream status in social psychology,
but one might think that social influence would be an ex-
ception. Reinforcement, after all, is defined in terms of the
control of behavior, and to the extent that a self-interest
premise underlies virtually all social psychological theories
(cf. Miller, 1999), it is hard to imagine how the promise of