Why do some people spontaneously follow the group's view, accept a request or obey a figure of authority? Social influence acts on behaviour continuously, often far more subtly than we imagine.
Understanding the mechanisms of conformity, compliance and obedience helps make better sense of individual and collective behaviour within organisations. This article also explores the part personality plays in how susceptible we are to these different forms of influence, particularly through two dimensions of the Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI): Interpersonal Sensitivity and Prudence.
For executives, HR directors and talent management professionals, these mechanisms matter especially: they shed light on how people take decisions, adapt to collective norms, react to authority and exert influence of their own.
Everyone has let other people shape their decisions at some point, consciously or otherwise. But what psychological mechanisms are at work when that happens? How do social forces alter our thinking, our feelings, our conduct?
Recently, on the podcast The Science of Personality, co-hosts Ryne Sherman, PhD, and Blake Loepp discussed how social interaction can lead people to change their behaviour.
"The influence our environment and other people exert on us has a significant impact on our lives," Ryne explains. "How do others influence us? And how do we influence them?"
Here are the three main forms of social influence, along with the part personality plays in how we respond to them.
"Influences reach us in all sorts of ways," Ryne explains.
From where products sit on a supermarket shelf to the default option offered for contributing to a 401(k) retirement plan, many factors shape our behaviour, often without our even being aware of it.
The three broad categories of social influence are these:
The article looks at each of these categories separately first, then examines why people are quite so receptive to social influence.
Of the three, conformity is the subtlest.
Ryne gives the example of a person standing in a public space, staring fixedly at the sky. Even with absolutely nothing to see, passers-by will stop and look up too. And the more people gather to look at the sky, the more other passers-by will stop and look as well.
The implicit reasoning is straightforward: if everyone is looking that way, there is probably something interesting to see.
Conformity thus amounts to trying to bring your reactions into line with other people's.
Going along with the group does not always have positive effects, however.
The researcher Solomon Asch showed that people would willingly give an incorrect answer to a simple question once others had confidently given a wrong one first.¹
"Plenty of people are willing to go along with it to stay in agreement with the group: 'The group says this, so I suppose I will say the same'," Ryne explains.
These mechanisms are particularly interesting in business. They can contribute to a team's cohesion, but they can equally encourage groupthink, where people hesitate to voice a dissenting view even when it might improve the collective decision.
People tend to act in ways consistent with how they have behaved before.
A sales technique known as "foot in the door" illustrates the power of compliance particularly well.
"Winning agreement through small requests, this foot-in-the-door idea, is genuinely extremely powerful," Ryne explains.
The researchers Freedman and Fraser contacted householders and asked permission to enter their homes in order to catalogue every product in the house. Most householders refused.
In another phase of the experiment, the researchers began by ringing householders with a far simpler question: which brand of soap did they use?
The following day, they rang back to ask permission to carry out that same inventory of products in the home.
This time, more than 50% of householders agreed.²
Simply having accepted a small request first led many people to change their behaviour considerably when a much larger request followed.
In organisations, this mechanism is a reminder of how far successive commitments can shape behaviour. An apparently trivial first decision can gradually structure the choices that follow, particularly where people want to stay consistent with the image they hold of themselves and with their own past actions.
In psychology, obedience means responding to a direct request or an order issued by a figure of authority.
The Milgram experiments are the classic illustration of this form of social influence.
The researcher Stanley Milgram set out to establish how far a person would go in administering electric shocks to another when told to continue, including when the person supposedly receiving the shocks appeared to be in extreme pain.³
The Milgram experiments were inspired in part by a wish to understand how officers of Nazi Germany had been able to commit terrible acts in the name of obeying orders.
How far are people prepared to follow the instructions they are given? And who decides to resist?
Around 40% of participants stopped the electric shocks despite the pressure exerted by the person they perceived as a figure of authority.
These experiments raise a fundamental question for leadership and organisational culture: how do you create environments in which people respect legitimate authority while retaining enough independence of judgement to voice disagreement when a decision looks problematic?
Three broad reasons lie behind conforming, complying and obeying:
Others influence us partly because their behaviour can help us make the right choice.
Social influence is sometimes a shortcut to a sound decision. Following collective common sense, a doctor's medical advice, or even, literally, a group of people, can have its advantages when we have to decide how to act.
In many situations, watching others reduces uncertainty and makes a decision quicker to reach.
People are also intrinsically motivated by the search for social approval.
Wanting to get on with those around us is a motivation every human shares.
"Being excluded is dangerous, historically as well as from an evolutionary point of view," Ryne explains. "Alone on the savannah, you do not survive very long."
Exclusion produces a feeling of insecurity, while acceptance helps us feel safe.
This need to belong plays a major part in organisations too. Organisational culture, collective norms and the behaviour of leaders all help determine what people regard as acceptable, valued or risky.
In the same vein, people also accept others' influence in order to seem likeable or agreeable.
They return a gift received, adapt to other people's preferences or do what is asked of them, not least in order to manage their reputation and how others perceive them.
Social influence is therefore not solely tied to wanting a good decision. It is also deeply connected to the need to maintain a certain image of oneself in one's relationships with others.
From a personality standpoint, two broad characteristics are associated with individual differences in susceptibility to social influence.
In the five-factor model of personality, they are generally called agreeableness and conscientiousness.
In the Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI), they correspond respectively to the Interpersonal Sensitivity and Prudence scales.
High Interpersonal Sensitivity is associated in particular with wanting to be liked by others.
High Prudence, meanwhile, is associated more with respect for authority and a tendency to follow instructions.
"In personality psychology, there is this idea that being more conscientious and more agreeable would always be preferable. But of course, the potential downsides of high Prudence or high Interpersonal Sensitivity come up frequently too," Ryne observes.
A recent replication of the Milgram experiments, for instance, showed that conscientiousness predicted administering more electric shocks and obeying the experimenter's instructions for longer.
The observation illustrates a fundamental principle of personality assessment: a characteristic generally seen as positive can become less well suited when it is expressed excessively or in certain specific situations.
Within a talent management, assessment and development, or coaching approach, the point is therefore not to look for an ideal personality profile, but to understand how certain behavioural tendencies can become strengths or, depending on the context, create risks.
Deciding whether to resist social influence or accept it can be genuinely difficult, not least given the consequences attached to the various options available.
Resisting the group is not easy. Nor is it necessarily desirable.
As Ryne points out:
"If everyone tells me 'Do not eat poison sumac', and I reply 'I am a nonconformist, so I am going to eat some', well, that is going to have consequences."
Conformity is therefore neither intrinsically positive nor intrinsically negative. In many situations, following others is a perfectly rational strategy. In others, the ability to question consensus or authority can be essential.
For organisations, the real challenge is building sustainable leadership and a culture in which people can tell the situations where following collective norms makes sense from those where exercising critical judgement becomes indispensable.
Studying social influence shows how far behaviour at work cannot be understood apart from its context.
People react simultaneously to their own personality, to social expectations, to their group's norms and to the figures of authority around them.
Personality assessment thus makes better sense of why some people seek the group's approval more than others, why some are particularly respectful of rules and hierarchy, or why others are more likely to question established norms.
For companies, this information can feed a genuine HR strategy: developing leadership potential, building teams, transforming teams, supporting managers and developing skills.
A rigorous approach to talent management is not about deciding which traits are "good" or "bad". It is rather about understanding how certain characteristics are expressed in a particular context and how they can support, or sometimes limit, performance.
That understanding is what strengthens the quality of decisions, the complementarity of teams and the lasting success of organisations.
At Authentic Talent, we believe that objective assessment of talent and potential within organisations is a decisive factor in their future success. If you would like to discuss it with us, let's talk!
This article draws on an article published on the Hogan Assessments website: Three Types of Social Influence: Conformity, Compliance, and Obedience
