Skip to main content icon/video/no-internet
icon backReturn to Entries

Normative Influence

Definition

Normative influence refers to the fact that people sometimes change their behavior, thoughts, or values to be liked and accepted by others. This results in conformity, in the form of individuals altering their utterances or demeanor to be more like what they perceive to be the norm. At the individual level, pivotal factors leading to normative influence are the desire to form a good impression and the fear of embarrassment. Normative influence is strongest when someone cares about the group exerting the influence and when behavior is performed in front of members of that group. It is one of social psychology's paradigmatic phenomena because it epitomizes the impact of the social world on an individual's thoughts and actions.

Normative influence has a somewhat negative image in Western industrialized cultures that value independent selves and individualistic values, and where being influenceable is seen as a character flaw. In reality, normative influence regulates people's daily lives much more than they like to recognize. Most people don't pay close attention to the dictum of fashion magazines, yet very few would go out dressed in ways that others might deem inappropriate. Furthermore, social psychological research has shown the surprising power and scope of normative influence: For example, it can lead to conformity to complete strangers, it can cause people to ignore evidence of their senses, it can effect widespread body image issues and eating disorders because of unrealistic ideals of beauty, and it can have disastrous consequences in cases of bystander effect and groupthink.

Normative versus Informational Influence

Morton Deutsch and Harold Gerard first provided the useful distinction between normative and informational influence: Whereas normative influence results from wanting to fit in regardless of accuracy, informational influence results from believing that the group may know better. If a person enters a room and everyone else is whispering, he or she might start whispering too. If the person does it because he or she assumes others have a good reason that the person doesn't know about (e.g., a baby is sleeping or the roof could collapse at any minute), the person is yielding to informational influence; if the person does it because he or she is afraid of the sideway glances and frowns that the person might get for being loud, then the person is succumbing to normative influence. As this example illustrates, the two forms of influence are often intertwined, but this distinction is useful in analyzing instances of conformity, including some classics in the field. Muzafer Sherif's studies of conformity with the autokinetic effect, for example, are typically interpreted as showing primarily informational influence: Faced with the ambiguous stimulus of an apparently moving dot of light in a dark room, participants converged to a common understanding of their reality when estimating the light's movement. In contrast, Solomon Asch's linenaming paradigm is often seen as demonstrating normative influence: In deciding which stimulus line matched the length of a template, conforming participants chose to suppress the answer they knew to be true to go along with the clearly wrong response endorsed by the majority of their peers. Informational influence is fueled by wanting to know what's right, whereas normative influence is motivated by wanting to get along.

...

  • Loading...
locked icon

Sign in to access this content

Get a 30 day FREE TRIAL

  • Watch videos from a variety of sources bringing classroom topics to life
  • Read modern, diverse business cases
  • Explore hundreds of books and reference titles

Read next

More like this

Sage Recommends

We found other relevant content for you on other Sage platforms.

close

Have you created a personal profile? Login or create a profile so that you can save clips, playlists and searches

close
close
close Signed In to profile You are signed in as:
close
Logged in Institution Institution