Nama : Annisa Nur Amalina

NIM : 175020301111012
Kelas : Perilaku Keorganisasian CD

Chapter 3: Following the Herd

Social influences exert a powerful effect on human learning and behavior. Social forces can
convey information as to what might be best for you to do or think or exert peer pressure to
conform in order to curry favor or avoid conflict.

2 categories of social influence:

1. Information - If many people do something or think something, their actions and thoughts
convey information about what might be best for you to do and think.
2. Peer pressure - If you care about what other people might think about you (in the mistaken
belief that they are paying attention to what you are doing), then you might go along with the
crowd to avoid their wrath or get their favor

Because of the spotlight effect, we think that others are paying close attention to what we do
and spend extraordinary effort conforming to social norms and fashions. Experiments reveal
that people pay far less attention to one another than we think, but our misperception
nonetheless leads to additional conformity.

Many experiments demonstrate how focusing on others thoughts and behavior can lead
to conformity effects. For example, people are 20-40% more likely to err in a ridiculously
easy visual perception tasks after watching a room full of their cohorts make blatant mistakes.
These effects are mitigated when experiments call for anonymous answers, suggesting that
people are especially likely to go along with group blunders if their reputations are on the
line. Similar findings have been observed in tasks that involved more subtle errors as well.

Moreover these effects endure over time, helping to explain collective conservatism: the
tendency of groups to stick to established patterns even as new needs arise. Knowing this,
however, makes it possible to nudge people in a positive direction by initiating a bandwagon
effect that changes information and behavior for the better.
Conformism also affects cultural and political behavior. Experiments reveal that people are
more likely to, e.g., download a song if many other people have done so beforehand,
suggesting that past popularity has powerful momentum—thus small interventions and
coincidences early on can produce large variations in outcomes. Of course, this often occurs
unintentionally (e.g., those who eat with one other person eat about 35% more than they do
when they are alone; members of a group of four eat about 75% more; those in groups of
seven or more eat 96% more). But this can be exploited, as when advertisements emphasize
the fact that “most people prefer” brand X, and thus social nudges are a powerful resource for
choice architecture.

Just like these social influences, priming also provides subtle influences that can increase the
ease with which certain information comes to mind. For example, peoples’ conduct can be
affected by the “mere-measurement effect,” whereby people will behave differently just in
response to being asked, e.g., what they intend to do and how they intend to do it. Likewise,
people can be primed by exposure to simple and apparently irrelevant cues: people become
more competitive and less generous when they see objects characteristic of business
environments, and more cleanly when they eat if there is a scent of all-purpose cleaner in the
room.