Influence

Every species of social animal and eusocial insect must have a means of social influence—a way for one or more members of the species to direct, coordinate, and influence other members of the species. Such social influence tactics determine the allocation of resources within a community of the species and also provide an evolutionary advantage to social species in their quest to gain the resources needed for survival. For example, Pogonomyrmex barbatus (red harvester ants) dynamically allocate tasks within their colonies (e.g., forging, patrolling, midden work) by having each ant follow a social consensus rule of “the more contact with another ant succeeding at a task, the more likely I should switch to that task.” Pan troglodytes (chimpanzees) use a number of social influence tactics to establish social relationships and to allocate resources, including coalition formation, reciprocity, submissive greetings to establish a dependency relationship, empathy, and the establishment of norms. Humans (Homo sapiens) employ a variety of social influence techniques that are highly adaptive to a range of social and environmental situations.

Social influence means any noncoercive technique, device, procedure, or manipulation that relies on the social psychological nature of the organism as the means for creating or changing the belief or behavior of a target, regardless of whether or not this attempt is [Page 476]based on the specific actions of an influence agent or the result of the self-organizing nature of social systems. It can be contrasted with two other forms of influence: (1) power or the control of critical resources, including its most extreme application of war; and (2) outright deception to lead an organism to believe he or she is doing X but in reality is doing something else. In other words, social influence uses tactics that appeal to the social nature of the organism. Among humans, it is their nature to fear, feel dissonance, return a favor, value what is scarce, empathize with others, make judgments dependent on context, seek phantom goals, and easily adopt the social roles of their social group, along with other characteristics. Social influence tactics make use of these attributes of human nature to invoke such processes as conformity (creating or changing behavior or belief to match the response of others), persuasion or attitude change (change in response to a message, discourse, or communication), compliance (change in response to an explicit request), yielding to social forces (change in response to the structure of the social situation), or helping (change in response to someone's need).