Towards an integration of different approaches to social influence: from thought-listing to source-message evaluation

Abstract

The present paper aims to contribute to a convergence of two distinct approaches to social influence, one based on persuasion literature, and one based on the genetic model of social influence. Moreover, the goal is to disentangle the conditions that affect the complex relations among source status (majority vs. minority), kind of influence (direct vs. indirect), type of argumentation (strong vs. weak), and psychological processes (cognitive processing vs. comparison validation elaboration). In both experiments source status and argument quality were manipulated, and a third independent variable was introduced, the introduction (or not) of a thought listing task (Experiment 1), and the introduction of differential psychological process, cognitive processing (via a thought listing task) vs. comparison validation elaboration (via a source-message evaluation) (Experiment 2). Analyses showed that, in Experiment 1, the no-thought list conditions led to greater direct influence whereas the thought listing conditions led to greater indirect influence. Also, minority influence was greater than majority influence. In Experiment 2, only in the thought-listing conditions, as in Experiment 1, strong arguments led to greater direct influence than weak arguments; for indirect influence significant results were found for minority source only: weak arguments were more influential in thought listing condition than source-message evaluation condition and strong arguments in source-message evaluation condition. These findings are discussed in the light of bringing together two distinct thus far approaches to social influence.

Keywords

• social influence,
• thoughtlist,
• source-message evaluation,
• psychologisation,
• denial