Abstract
Both classical social psychological theories and recent formal models of opinion differentiation and bi-polarization assign a prominent role to negative social influence. Negative influence is defined as shifts away from the opinion of others and hypothesized to be induced by discrepancy with or disliking of the source of influence. There is strong empirical support for the presence of positive social influence (a shift towards the opinion of others), but evidence that large opinion differences or disliking could trigger negative shifts is mixed. We examine positive and negative influence with controlled exposure to opinions of other individuals in one experiment and with opinion exchange in another study. Results confirm that similarities induce attraction, but results do not support that discrepancy or disliking entails negative influence. Instead, our findings suggest a robust positive linear relationship between opinion distance and opinion shifts.
Highlights
Social influence is a powerful force that fosters opinion convergence in groups [1,2,3,4]
Disliking or derogating the source evolves more likely when individuals have a larger disagreement [70,71,72,73,74]. In line with this argument, in Study 2, we examine whether attraction moderates the effect of opinion distance on opinion shifts
The scatter plot shows that there were opinion shifts that resulted in increased opinion differences
Summary
Social influence is a powerful force that fosters opinion convergence in groups [1,2,3,4]. Mathematical models demonstrated that when people consistently move their opinions closer to the opinions of those they interact with, perfect opinion consensus is inevitable, unless some subset of group members is entirely cut off from interaction [10,11,12,13,14,15,16]. This has left social scientists studying social influence with a theoretical puzzle of why there is persistent opinion diversity in the presence of permanent social influence [9, 12, 17]. Studies of college dormitories [24], international work teams [25], and representative opinion surveys on controversial issues in the public debate [26,27,28] even demonstrated that influence dynamics sometimes result in gradually increasing dissimilarity and bi-polarization [29]
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