The Psychology of Social Influence
Modes and Modalities of Shifting Common Sense

Theoretically different modalities of social influence are set out and a blueprint for the study of socio-political dynamics is delivered.

Gordon Sammut (Author), Martin W. Bauer (Author)

9781108416375, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 7 January 2021

280 pages
15 x 23 x 2 cm, 0.62 kg

'[Most college students] are not yet specialists or experts and so they need a survey and guide. This book seems the best fit for meeting that need. It can serve as a textbook for teaching senior undergraduate or beginning graduate classes across the field of social and behavioral sciences.' Hak-Soo Kim, Asian Journal for Public Opinion Research

This volume brings together the full range of modalities of social influence - from crowding, leadership, and norm formation to resistance and mass mediation - to set out a challenge-and-response 'cyclone' model. The authors use real-world examples to ground this model and review each modality of social influence in depth. A 'periodic table of social influence' is constructed that characterises and compares exercises of influence in practical terms. The wider implications of social influence are considered, such as how each exercise of a single modality stimulates responses from other modalities and how any everyday process is likely to arise from a mix of influences. The book demonstrates that different modalities of social influence are tactics that defend, question, and develop 'common sense' over time and offers advice to those studying in political and social movements, social change, and management.

1. Modalities of social influence: preconditions (public sphere) and demarcations (non-violence)
Part I. Eternal Resources of Populism: 2. Crowding: contagion and imitation
3. Leading: directors, dictators and dudes
Part II. Experimental paradigms: 4. Norming and frames of reference
5. Conforming and converting
6. Obeying: authority and compliance
7. Persuading and convincing
Part III. Necessary Extensions: 8. Agenda setting, framing and mass mediation
9. Designing and resisting artefacts
Part IV. Theoretical Integration: 10. Common sense: normalisation, assimilation and accommodation
11. Epilogue: theoretical excursions and challenges
References
Index.

Subject Areas: Social, group or collective psychology [JMH], Psychology [JM], Communication studies [GTC]