What Is Social Influence?

Social influence refers to the many ways people affect one another. It involves changes in attitudes or behavior that result from the comments, actions, or simply the presence of others. Other people routinely try to influence us—friends pressure us to go out drinking, advertisers try to get us to adopt the latest fashion, charities ask us for money, and parents, politicians, and priests attempt to shape our moral, political, or religious values. And we often try to influence others ourselves, as when we nonconsciously smile at someone for actions we like, frown at someone for behavior we dislike, or deliberately try to coax a friend into doing us a favor. Effectively navigating social interactions requires us to figure out when to yield to others’ attempts to influence us and when—and how—to resist. It also requires that we exercise some skill in our own attempts to influence others.

Social psychologists distinguish among several types of social influence. The most familiar form of influence is conformity, defined as changing one’s beliefs or behavior to more closely align with those of others, in response to some (real or imagined) pressure to do so. As noted earlier, the pressure to conform can be implicit, as when you decide to toss out your loose-fitting jeans in favor of those with a tighter cut (or vice versa) simply because other people are doing so. But conformity pressure can also be explicit, as when members of a peer group pointedly encourage one another to vape, try new drugs, or push the envelope on the latest extreme sport. On the good side, pressure to conform can inspire people to volunteer for a community service event, reduce one’s carbon footprint, or be more accepting of members of marginalized groups.

When conformity pressure is sufficiently explicit, it blends into another type of social influence called compliance, which occurs when a person responds favorably to an explicit request from another person. Compliance attempts can come from people with some power over you, as when your boss asks you to run an errand, or they can come from peers, as when a classmate asks to borrow your notes. Compliance attempts from powerful people often aren’t as nuanced and sophisticated as those from peers because they don’t have to be. (Think how much easier it would be for your professor to persuade you to loan her $20 than it would be for the person who happens to be sitting next to you in the classroom.) Another type of social influence, obedience, occurs when a more powerful person, an authority figure, issues a demand (rather than a request) to which a less powerful person submits.