Tutorial

This tutorial consists of 6 lessons on the fundamental notions of social influence, links listed here. The first five lessons pertain to what makes social influence successful. The sixth concerns what makes social influence ethical. I would recommend taking the lessons in the order given.

What is social influence?
What is the key to influence success?
What should go into an influence attempt?
Are you engaging the recipient?
What motivates compliance?
What is ethical influence?

LESSON 1

What is social influence?

Social influence consists of people changing people. A good way to delineate the meaning of the term social influence is to look at some examples. The list below will help you get a feel for what is meant by the concept. Also see the blog post, Elaboration of the Examples of Social Influence.

You ask your spouse to water the flowers.
A product commercial is aired.
A documentary designed to change attitudes is broadcast.
A television news network promotes a political viewpoint.
Fellow students dress casually.
Your city of residence sends you a property tax bill.
An aspiring politician makes several points during a candidates’ debate.
Your doctor prescribes a medication.
The armed forces recruits new soldiers.
A movie is shown.
A coaching staff gives you direction on how to improve performance.
The government of a country provides large cash subsidies to its media companies.
A media company excludes certain people and content from its platforms.
A professor teaches a university course.
The police enforce a law.
Parents set a curfew.
Your hockey teammates compete vigorously.
Detectives interrogate a suspect for hours in a cold room.
A university changes its admission policy.
An airline develops a reputation for excellent service.

LESSON 2

What is the key to influence success?

The key to influence success is knowing that people comply if they expect to gain something of value. Consider the situation many among us face, namely having to pay one kind of tax or another. Say the city we live in sends us a property tax bill. This is an influence attempt. The city is trying to get us to pay the bill. We could comply or refuse. The path we take will be determined by our assessment of the outcomes we would experience in the two cases, paying versus not paying. Paying would result in a smaller bank account and keeping things tranquil. Refusing would bring penalties, which would be several and escalating. Persistent refusal could lead ultimately to eviction from our home. Chances are we would comply because the outcomes of paying are more desirable than of not paying.

This example also illustrates that gain means net gain, namely the desirability of one action, compliance, relative to another, noncompliance. In this example, what we get from paying our taxes is better than what we get from refusing to pay them. It is pretty clear in a case like agreeing to pay our taxes that expected net gain is crucial to social influence success.

Gains come in two forms: The first is something pleasant achieved. A pay check, friendship, the birth of a child, continued comfort, and a vacation are all examples. The second notion of gain is something negative avoided. A stomach ache, ostracism, a fine, jail, a car accident, death, and work stress are all examples. Compliance occurs when an assessment indicates that going along will result in a superior mix of pleasant things achieved and unpleasant things avoided.

The notion that expected net gain is the principal cause of the recipient complying or not complying is so central a concept in my conception that I refer to it as the axiom of gain. The axiom of gain gives the influencer a strategy: An influence attempt that depicts compliance as resulting in net gain has a better chance of success than an influence attempt that depicts compliance as resulting in net loss. Having this sound starting point is no small achievement. What more can we say about the form that an influence attempt should take? Read on.

LESSON 3

What should go into an influence attempt?

If we were to create an influence attempt, what should we put into it? The first things would be a description of expected behaviour¹ and a depiction of a net gain resulting from performing the behaviour. These are what the previous lesson emphasized and what serve as the core of any influence attempt. To improve the chances of compliance occurring, the influencer should do two more things, make the depiction of gain plausible and make oneself credible.

An influence attempt must communicate a plausible message if it is to be effective. To this end, the influencer must anticipate or control how the recipient will interpret the message. This is easy to illustrate. Let us say someone sends you an email promising to deposit a million dollars into your bank account if you send them the necessary log-in information for the account. Recipient knowledge is crucial to whether they go along with the request or not. Most people know that an offer that seems too good to be true probably is and that giving one’s bank information to strangers is ill advised. These people will not comply. A small number of people possess knowledge that would lead to compliance. Perhaps a child old enough to own a bank account but too young to know some adults can be malicious has received the phishing email and thinks its genuine. Compliance will succeed in a small number of cases of this type. The bigger lesson is that the recipient’s knowledge base determines their judgment of message plausibility and hence their compliance.

It is instructive to point out what is not a factor determining plausibility judgments. Ideally, the recipient would want the chance to observe before performance of a requested act whether the outcomes promised by the source actually come true. You would wish to determine that the promise of a one million dollar award was genuine before you had to give over your bank account password. This is never possible. Influence attempts, by their nature, require you to comply before the promised outcomes happen. This is why you are left with the imperfect process of having to predict the likelihood of the outcomes occurring. Your judgement will always be probabilistic, not certain.

The other goal when mounting an influence attempt is to survive the evaluation of yourself, the influencer, particularly with respect to believability. Source credibility, namely the likelihood of the influencer in question validly modelling relevant behaviour-outcome linkages, can make all the difference. This is easy to illustrate: For someone who hurt their ankle, whose advice would be taken regarding treatment, that of a doctor or that of a barista? Certainly the doctor would be heeded due to their medical know how. On matters of coffee, though, it would be better to go along with the barista.

Every influence attempt predicts a scenario in which recipients gain something by doing something. The chances of compliance will be enhanced if the recipient perceives the scenario as plausible and the communicator as credible.

One final issue concerns how you make a message plausible and a source credible. There are many ways. I would suggest two, one pertaining to message and one pertaining to source (discussed at more length in the lesson, What is Ethical Influence?) First, offer the recipient a genuine gain. They will be likely to see the promise of gain for the plausible offer that it is. Second, consistently offer the recipient genuine promises of gain. Based on the reputation you develop in so doing, you will be judged as credible.

LESSON 4

Are you engaging the recipient?

Once you compose an influence message, you must get it across. To this end, you must get the message to engage the recipient for the message to have any effect. Engagement consists of the recipient attending to, learning, and evaluating the message. Let us look at two examples to get an appreciation for the process of engagement.

The first case is your doctor prescribing you medication. Engagement, in the form of attention, learning, and evaluation is highly likely to happen in this case. Attention to the influence attempt is assured because you as the patient are wanting to listen. Given that attention has occurred, learning is highly likely because the doctor will explain things to you and you would want to learn. Given that attention and learning have occurred, evaluation of some kind will take place because human beings reflexively evaluate anything relevant to them. A doctor prescribing medication is a highly engaging situation.

As our second case, consider an advertisement presented on television. Attention, learning, and evaluation are much less likely to occur here compared to the case involving the doctor. You probably have no interest in most ads presented in commercials. If uninterested, you would do something like not pay attention, turn off the sound, or fast forward to the next event. Without attention to the message, no compliance could occur. If the message is attended to, you might not comprehend it sufficiently to know what it is asking you to do or what outcomes are being predicted. Without comprehension of the message, no compliance could occur. If the message is learned, some form of evaluation, whether extensive or brief, careful or impulsive, is highly likely to occur because human beings readily evaluate things. Given all this, any television commercial has two hurdles to get over in the communication process, attention and learning. If successful at these steps, an evaluation will likely also occur.

In formulating a message strategy, an influencer must be concerned with satisfying each of the steps in engagement, these being attention, learning, and evaluation. The criteria are necessary for a message to have any chance to persuade. Yet the criteria do not guarantee compliance because the message itself must provide a convincing expectation of gain. One thing is certain. A failure to get a message across insures the failure of a social influence attempt.

LESSON 5

What motivates compliance?

To this point I have been using the blanket term, gain. Now I deal, more specifically, with the types of gains people seek and therefore what an influencer would promise in order to maximize the chances of compliance. If you want someone to do something make sure you tell them all the good things that requested behaviour would bring them. The full list of gain types can be derived from a taxonomy of human motives. Here are five motives that come up in psychology again and again:

The desire for physical well-being is an obvious motive capable of driving action. An attempt to change someone is likely to have an effect if it provides a way for the person to avoid physical risk or improve physical well-being. A believable message indicating that a certain vaccine can prevent us from contracting a serious disease can have a powerful impact. Signs of physical danger get people’s attention and provoke action to avoid the danger.

A desire for competence drives action. Messages that describe ways of enhancing knowledge or improving skill can be quite effective. This is why students shop for the best universities and courses of study and athletes place their trust in the recommendations of good coaches.

The desire for good standing in your community drives action. We seek social acceptance and avoid social rejection. You need not go far to find examples of influence that suggest ways to maintain good standing. A common example from recent history: You observe in your community the rejection of people who express certain views. They are attacked on social media. They lose friends. They lose their jobs. Observing these heavy handed tactics of influence, you conclude that you might experience the same fate if you express the offending views, so you censor your own speech.

The desire for goodness drives action. This is commonly termed acting on principle or doing the right thing. Appeals to principle can be effective. In response to advertisements for charitable giving, human beings give vast amounts of money even when there is no benefit other than living up to a personal standard of goodness.

The prospect of gaining a desirable emotional state drives action. When suffering, we become motivated to restore a tranquil state. An accused might confess to a crime after many hours of intense interrogation in a cold room. The confession, even though false, is given solely for the purpose of escaping the aversive situation and gaining a degree of comfort. When we are stressed or bored, play is sought as a remedy. People love recreational activities, spectator events, vacations, and travel. The tourism, sport clothing, and recreational equipment industries help serve these needs and can commonly be seen advertising their products. We take the companies up on their offers and gain the joys and comforts that result. Influence attempts that predict a positive emotional experience if certain behaviour is performed are common and can be quite effective.

If you look at the list of influence examples given at the beginning of this website, you will see that each one appeals to one or more of the above-listed motives. It is possible for the motives to conflict. I would want to water the flowers if my spouse asks me to (doing the right thing, keeping standing in the marriage) but might not do so if it means getting caught in the rain (physical well-being). That would be a case of a conflict. An influence attempt will have a greater chance of success if all the related motives promote compliance than if the motives conflict in this regard. So, I will wait for it to stop raining before I go out to water the flowers.

LESSON 6

What is ethical influence?

I advocate for the use of ethical influence. There are many good reasons for this, perhaps foremost among them, the Golden Rule: “So whatever you wish others would do to you, do also to them” (Matthew 7:12). What is ethical influence? An ethical influence attempt announces a potential gain for the recipient, comprises quality advising by the influencer, and serves the social good.

An influence attempt is ethical if performing the behaviour that is requested will bring the recipient the net gain that is promised. Not only does the source of influence make the promise, it delivers on the promise.

Ethical influence consists of good advising. Think of advisers to a head of state. They provide information useful for leader decisions and might even offer an opinion of their own on a course of action, but there is never any doubt regarding who should have the final say. It is the head of state who has been given the power to settle an issue. The advisor is expected to serve the head of state faithfully and well. The advisor promotes the executive’s capacity to lead and avoids truncating or usurping that function. This, I believe, serves as a good model for how the influencer should act toward the recipient.

There are three things a good adviser does. The first is to take on the advisor role. This means acting to maximize the recipient’s power, not strictly one’s own power. The second is to provide the recipient access to the best information possible for evaluating an impending decision. This is so an accurate prediction about the outcomes of suggested behaviour can be formulated. The third is to facilitate independent study of the merits of suggested action. The recipient should be referred to credible research material and provided the necessary study conditions.

Vending on Amazon goes a long way to fulfilling the good advising criterion. An item is offered for purchase. The seller describes features of their product. The depiction will list advantages but not likely disadvantages of the purchase. This is not the only information available. User comments and ratings are provided, which represent an independent portrayal of both advantages and disadvantages of the product. Finally, you are able to take all the time you need, in private, to decide on the merits of the purchase. Amazon cannot do much better than providing a listing of principal outcomes, pro and con, giving access to additional and independent information relevant to the decision, affording the time and quiet necessary for deciding, and insuring the decision is not pressured.

Finally, asking people to do things that contribute to the social good, or not contribute to social decay, represents a further ethical criterion. An advertisement to gamble, aside from its individual ramifications, has a host of social effects, some good, some bad. The advertisements help the business thrive, which in turn contributes to the economy. The advertisements are an exercise of the right to free speech. The advertisements announce an opportunity for a pleasant pastime, which many people enjoy. On the negative side, the promotion of gambling and resulting flourishing of the activity would result in an increase in cases of gambling addiction. There would be a concurrent increase in failures on the part of the addicted to meet family and work responsibilities. So, not only would the gambler be adversely affected, so would children, spouses, and employers. Gambling advertisements, by the social benefit criterion, would be of mixed effect. Similar issues have arisen in connection with smoking and alcohol advertising.

Influencers should thus know the social impacts of their influence practices and consider these when developing strategies and tactics of influence. In cases where the practises of a source contribute to a serious social problem, governments will sometimes intervene to prohibit an influence practice.

Together, the criteria of individual benefit, good advising, and social benefit represent an ideal of decency. Clearly, the standards are not always met. Ideally they would be met because a failure to do so could have negative impacts of various sorts.