The aim of this article is to introduce the concept of social influence. Indeed, we can observe some situations where people adopt different behaviours than their usual behaviours because of the other’s influence. So studying the concept of social influence can be a good way to explain historical events like the Holocauste for example.
To begin with the definition of social influence, we can say that there are two kinds of social influence : majority and minority influence. Today, we will only present the concept majority influence.
According to Blanchet and Trognon, two psychology professors, majority influence can be defined as a group imposing ideas or behaviours that the individuals will eventually adopt. This submission includes different other concepts.
The first one is normalization, defined by Sheriff in 1936 as an essential phenomenon to live in society because people need to create a collective norm and submit themselves to it in order to be in agreement with the others.
Then, the notion of conformism is also part of the concept of social influence. It has been defined by Asch in 1952 as a situation where the individual adopts the same behaviour as another individual or a group because he doesn’t want to be on the margins of the group or risk to appear as deviant. Therefore, the individuals do or say things they don’t really think or things which are in opposition with their morals. But they do it anyway because they want to be like the others, and that leads to the standardization of the group.
Finally we can talk about the notion of obedience to authority, a concept described by Milgram in 1974. According to that concept, the subject goes from an independent state (where he is responsible of what he does and acts consciously) to an agentic state. Blanchet and Trognon define the agentic state as a situation where the individual is not responsible of his actions anymore but he is like an executive agent of the will of someone else. And there are 3 conditions to be in that state :
- the individual has to accept the authority as legitimate.
- then this authority has to be directly practised on the individual.
- and there must be a coherence between the order given and the status of the authority figure.
Obedience to authority has been studied by Philip Zimbardo with his famous Stanford experiment in 1971. In his university, he reproduced the conditions of a prison by using students as subjects. The aim was to study relationships between prison guards and prisoners. However, he had to interrupt his experiment earlier because of the deviant behaviour of the false guards. So this experiment is a good illustration of authority influence because after they were given orders, the students playing the role of guards released themselves from any responsibility. They acted under an agentic state.
Sources :
Moscovici, S., Ricateau, P. (1972). Chapitre 5 – Conformité, minorité et influence sociales. Dans Introduction à la psychologie sociale – Tome 1 – Les phénomènes de base (p. 139-191). Collection : Sciences humaines et Sociales.
Richardot, S. (2008). 3. L’apport de la psychologie sociale à la question de l’obéissance : les travaux de Stanley Milgram sur la soumission à l’autorité. Dans : André Loez éd., Obéir, désobéir (pp. 47-59). Paris: La Découverte. https://doi.org/10.3917/dec.loez.2008.01.0047″