Normative social influence

Normative social influence is a type of social influence leading to conformity. It is defined in social psychology as "the influence of other people that leads us to conform in order to be liked and accepted by them". The power of normative social influence stems from the human identity as a social being, with a need for companionship and association. This fact often leads to people exhibiting public compliance—but not necessarily private acceptance—of the group's social norms in order to be accepted by the group. Social norms refers to the unwritten rules that govern social behavior. These are customary standards for behavior that are widely shared by members of a culture.

Solomon Asch conducted his classic conformity experiments in an attempt to discover if people would still conform when the right answer was obvious. Specifically, he asked participants in his experiment to judge the similarity of lines, an easy task by objective standards. Using confederates, he created the illusion that an entire group of participants believed something that was clearly false (i.e., that dissimilar lines were actually similar). When in this situation, participants conformed over a third of the time on trials where the confederates gave blatantly false answers. When asked to make the judgements in private, participants gave the right answer more than 98% of the time. Asch's results cannot be explained by informational social influence, because in this case, the task was easy and the answer obvious. Thus, participants were not necessarily looking to others in order to figure out what the right answer was, as informational social influence would predict; instead, they were seeking acceptance and avoiding disapproval. Follow-up interviews with participants of the original Asch studies confirmed this fact; when asked about why they conformed, many participants provided reasons other than a need for accuracy.

In more current research, Schultz (1999) found that households that received more normative messages in which described the frequency and amount of weekly recycling, began to have a direct impact on both the households frequency and amount of curbside recycling. The sudden change was due to the fact that "the other neighbors'" recycling habits had a direct normative effect on the household to change theirs. Similar results were apparent in another study in which researchers were able to increase household energy conservation through the use of normative messages. Participants in this conservation study did not believe that such normative messages could influence their behavior; they attributed their conservation efforts to environmental concerns or social responsibility needs. Thus, normative social influence can be a very powerful, yet undetected, motivator of behavior.

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