Two types of situations produce informational influence: (a) ambiguous situations, so that people do not know how to behave; and (b) crisis situations, so that people don’t have time to think for themselves.
If you look at a pinpoint of light in a dark room, the light appears to move even though it does not actually move at all. This illusion of movement, caused by very slight movements of the eye, is called the autokinetic effect.
Muzafer Sherif (1935) used the autokinetic effect to study the formation of group norms. Group norms are the beliefs or behaviors that a group of people accepts as normal. Sherif asked individual participants in a dark room to estimate how far the light moved. Their individual estimates ranged from about 1 inch to about 8 inches. They repeated this process on subsequent days, but in the presence of two other participants. As participants heard the estimates provided by others, their individual answers converged and became more similar.
These social norms are not temporary, either; they can last at least one year (Rohrer, Baron, Hoff man, & Swander, 1954). These social norms can also be transmitted from one person to another. In another study that used the autokinetic effect (Jacobs & Campbell, 1961), researchers had a confederate give an inflated estimate of how far the light moved in the presence of a real participant. Th e confederate was then replaced by a real participant, who was in turn replaced by another real participant, and so on. The inflated estimate persisted over five generations of research participants. Thus, people ended up conforming to the (false) norms set by someone who was by this point long gone.
The studies conducted by Sherif indicate a second type of social influence called informational influence. Informational influence involves going along with the crowd because you think the crowd knows more than you do (rather than because you want to be liked, as with normative social influence). It fits the “people first” theme we have seen throughout this book: People get valuable information from others, and sometimes they give more weight to what others think than to what their own eyes and ears tell them.
Two types of situations produce informational influence: (a) ambiguous situations, so that people do not know how to behave; and (b) crisis situations, so that people don’t have time to think for themselves. In these situations, people conform to what others are doing because they assume that those others know what they are doing. Sometimes this assumption is wrong—others really do not know more than we do. In fact, others may assume that we know more than they do. In some cases, nobody knows anything, which is called a state of pluralistic ignorance.
In short, there are two different motives to conform: normative and informational. A key difference is whether the conforming person comes to believe that others are right or believes they are wrong but conforms simply to avoid rejection, ridicule, hostility, or other kinds of punishment. Informational social influence helps produce private acceptance— a genuine inner belief that others are right. Normative social influence may elicit mere public compliance—outwardly going along with the group but maintaining a private, inner belief that the group is wrong. The Jonestown example contained both. Some people probably believed that Jones was a great religious leader with correct views, because they were surrounded by others who expressed those beliefs. Others went along under pressure of punishment and threat of death.
