Norms and Conformity III

Social influences play an important role in social interactions. Social psychologists suggest that social influence can be informational or normative. Informational social influence occurs when the need to know what is right. They use others as a source of information. Informational social influence usually results in private acceptance wherein people truly believe in what other people are saying or doing.

Informational social influence has been used by economists to explain herd behavior and information cascade, showing how individual rational action can lead to group irrationality (Banerjee, 1992; Bikhchandani et al., 1992). Normative social influence, on the other hand, occurs because people have the need to be accepted by others. Normative social influence usually leads to public compliance, but not necessarily private acceptance. Normative social influence plays an important role in the functioning of social norms.

Social psychologists suggest that people are prone to social influence even when no other people are present. According to the self-awareness theory, people engage in the introspection process and evaluate and compare their behavior to their internal standards and values (Carver, 2003; Duval and Silvia, 2002). We want to consider ourselves as good, decent, wise, and intelligent individuals, and we want to be like by others. In order to feel good about ourselves, we tend to avoid taking actions that are socially inappropriate and abide by our personal norms. When we internalize social norms as our inner beliefs, we will also actively do what is prescribed by social norms.