Kioussis, Chaela (2022) The Effect of Group Identification, Argument Strength and Information Focus on Social Influence. Bachelor thesis, Psychology.
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Abstract
Social influence is one of the most significant areas of social psychology and an integral part of everyday life which informs our actions and decision making. Yet why does social influence take place? A variety of theories have attempted to explain this phenomenon. An integrative model of the social influence process has been suggested by Spears (2021) providing a model displaying the three general domains of influence which looks at whether the self is involved (self-focus), as well as the different levels at which the self is involved (personal vs group). The present experimental study investigated the effects of group identification, argument strength and information focus on social influence. It included 214 participants from the University of Groningen (74.8% female, 24.9% male) who were assigned to four different experimental conditions: strong or weak arguments, informational focus or absence of informational focus, as well as group identification and need for cognition that were used as moderators. Participants were then asked to give their opinion on a new software program following arguments made by other students and their thoughts on hiring a new lecturer to the university. Participants that were high in identification were more influenced than participants that were low in identification. No effects were found for argument strength, information salience, the interaction between argument strength and information focus, and for the three-way interaction between argument strength, information focus and identification. Results show that group identification may have a bigger impact than we would expect on social influence.
| Item Type: | Thesis (Bachelor) |
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| Supervisor name: | Spears, R. and Noord, J.J.L. van |
| Degree programme: | Psychology |
| Differentiation route: | Applied Social Psychology (ASP) [Bachelor Psychology] |
| Date Deposited: | 03 May 2022 10:41 |
| Last Modified: | 03 May 2022 10:41 |
| URI: | http://gmwpublic.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/id/eprint/431 |
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