Consumer Psychology Lecture notes - Week 7 PDF

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Consumer Psychology weekly notes, mainly based on lectures and module book summaries....

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Introduction Video: Week Seven: Social Influence:       

If you went to the supermarket and the till worker wished you an awful day, you would be quite surprised. This is because the shopkeeper broke an unspoken rule. You simply don’t wish people an awful day. These unspoken rules are called Social Norms  “Informal rules and standards that are understood by members of a group”. They guide and/or constrain human behaviour without the force of laws. This means that people are inclined to copy others’ behaviour. ‘Asch Paradigm’ from elevator experiment  when a person’s own opinion and actions are influenced by a majority group. This is social conformity = when people find comfort in acting the same way as the rest of the group. “a type of social influence involving a change in belief or behaviour in order to fit in with a group” Why do people comply with social norms? There are two main reasons: 1. Informative Social Influence: the way that other people behave is a good source of information. Other’s may know something that you don’t and therefore you behave in the way they do. Thus, by copying people’s behaviour you may learn something that you didn’t know yet.  This was studied in the late 60’s by American social psychologist Stanley Milgram. They did an experiment to assess how social norms influence other people’s behaviour. In the experiment, a collaborator of the experiment stood in the corner of a street in New York looking up at the sky. He looked at the window of a building across the street where someone was flagging a signal behind a window. Researchers watched what passing pedestrians did when they saw the man looking up at the sky. 40% of passers-by looked up to see what this person was looking at.  Then, they repeated the experiment except this time with three people at the street corner all looking up. This time 60% of passers-by also looked up while walking on. 10% of the people eve stopped to look up. Milgram repeated this experiment several times, each time with a different number of people standing on the street corner.  The results found that the larger the group on the corner, the more people that would copy this behaviour. This effect is called Informative Social Influence. 2. Normative Social Influence: People seek approval and acceptance from their social environment for what they’re doing. The influence of other people that leads us to conform in order to be liked and accepted by them.  Imagine you see a pregnant woman smoking a cigarette. What do you think of this type of behaviour? Perhaps you can imagine that a lot of people would disapprove of her. This disapproval can make her feel very uncomfortable. This is especially the case if she likes these people, for example when they are friends or family. As a result, she may feel the need to change her behaviour to reduce feelings of uneasiness. This is Normative Social Influence. 

These two reasons to comply with social norms indicate that there are two different types of social norms. Firstly, there are Descriptive Social

Norms (e.g., don’t smoke when pregnant). This refers to other people’s actions. Secondly, Injunctive Social Norms (e.g., disapproving of smoking when pregnant). This refers to what other people think, so the behaviour that they either approve or disapprove of....