Social Influence Processes Research Articles

Peer influence on household energy behaviours

Studies across multiple disciplines demonstrate the importance of peers in shaping energy-related behaviours. Research on this process is wide ranging, from documenting spatial peer effects in the adoption of rooftop solar—when an individual’s behaviour is influenced by the behaviours of neighbours—to showing how neighbour comparisons can be used to reduce household electricity consumption. However, gaps exist in our understanding of how and why these peer effects occur. In this Review, we examine recent findings on social influence in energy behaviour and discuss pathways through which social influence can result in peer effects. We propose a conceptual framework for predicting which social influence processes will most often result in peer effects, depending on the targeted energy behaviour. We also review the limitations of social influence as well as evidence for when it is expected to be the strongest. Household energy behaviours are influenced by the behaviour of others. In this Review, the authors review recent findings on social influence in energy consumption and technology adoption and discuss pathways through which social influence can result in peer effects.

Effective Factors in Adoption of Mobile Health Applications between Medical Sciences Students Using the UTAUT Model.

Students with complex health care services process face constant challenges with regard to health education. The mobile devices are an important tool that can install various applications for using information such as clinical guidelines, drug resources, clinical calculations, and the latest scientific evidence without any time and place limitations. And this happens only when students accept and use it. The purpose of this article is to identify the factors influencing students in their intention to use mobile health (mHealth) by using Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) model. A standard questionnaire was used to collect the data from nearly 302 Lorestan University of medical science students including nutrition and public health, paramedicine, nursing and midwifery, pharmacy, dentistry, and medical schools. The data were processed using LISREL (Scientific Software International, Inc., Lincolnwood, Illinois) and SPSS (IBM Corp., Armonk, New York) softwares and the statistical analysis technique was based on structural equation modeling (SEM). A total of 300 questionnaires including valid responses were used in this study. The results showed that mediator of age did not affect the predictors of intention to use mHealth, and the level of education and gender directly affected the intention to use. In addition, effort expectancy, facilitating condition, and behavioral intention directly and indirectly have effect on use, whereas the result revealed no significant relationship between two important processes of performance expectancy and social influence with students' behavioral intention to use the mHealth. The present study provides valuable information on mobile health acceptance factors for widespread use of this device among students of universities of medical sciences as a base infrastructure for a variety of information about health services and learning. Review and comparison of results with other studies showed that mHealth acceptance factors were different from other end users (elderly, patients, and health professionals).

Social network determinants of screen time among adolescents

This research investigates the screen-based media consumption of adolescents in their social context, using social contagion theory to understand how screen-based media consumption is affected by an individual’s social environment. To assess the possibility of person-to-person spread and the social network determinants of screen-based media consumption behavior, analyses were performed on the social networks of adolescents. First, the social networks of adolescents were assessed for the degree of clustering of similar screen-based media behavior between friends. Second, regression analyses assess the extent to which these associations may be attributed to friendship selection or to social influence processes. Results show that high screen-based media consumption rates are strongly correlated with high screen-based media consumption rates in one’s friends. This association extends up to six degrees of separation. Implications for understanding how adolescents make decisions about how to consume media are discussed.

Determinants of perceived usefulness of social media in university libraries: Subjective norm, image and voluntariness as indicators

The study examined the role of social influence process of subjective norm, image and voluntariness on perceived usefulness of social media (PUSM) in private university libraries. The quest to ascertain the impact of the social factor in a profit-motivated environment prompted the study. The descriptive research design alongside multistage sampling procedures was applied and the questionnaire method was used for data collection. One hundred and ninety (190) librarians, selected from 13 private university libraries provided the data, out of which 184 copies of the instrument were correctly filled and returned, representing 96.8 per cent return rate. Statistical tools like simple percentage, mean and standard deviation of the Special Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) were employed to analyse the research questions. Results shown that image was the strongest determinant among the proposed social factors of PUSM, followed by subjective norm. While voluntariness was a weak predictor of PUSM, the overall PUSM of librarians in the private university domain in the studied region was very high. This implies that the social factor is significant predictor of technology adoption in the private university library environment. Accordingly, the study concluded that if the performance potentials of social media are consciously communicated and imbibed by librarians through adequate training, whether or not private universities operate in a mandatory environment, PUSM of librarians will remain positively high.

Means of Influence on Public Opinion in Political Context: Speech Manipulation in the Media

The manipulation problem in the media has been still pressing. Processes and techniques intended for making an influence on public opinion and behaviors are in ongoing improvement, making it difficult to access an objective image of the world. Therefore, this research aims at emphasizing the importance of speech (language) means that form a basis of manipulations in mass communications. To achieve this, authors have provided the systematization of social influence processes in the media and made techniques and means of speech influence clearer. Authors provided a content analysis of texts of 2018 from the media using news resources of different countries (‘Russia Today, ’ ‘RIA Novosti, ’ ‘Ukrinform’ and ‘Fox News Channel’) as an example. The research subject consists of news materials of a politico-social nature on Russia's participation in the Syrian conflict. Authors have empirically revealed a clear desire to influence readers of the media resources using covert means of the manipulative influence. In total, they have found five types of manipulative speech influence in texts of the media. There are self-presentation, semantic speech strategies, persuasive strategies, hit piece and information manipulation. A lexical toolkit of speech manipulation includes euphemisms, dysphemisms, slogan words, speech metaphorization, etc. Media texts have become more and more complicated as they contain hints, precedent phenomena, irony, as well as metamessages of informative presentation. Each media of the selected ones more or less uses means of speech manipulation in varying degrees. Applications of such methods of influence (in number) almost directly depend on a political attitude towards an object.

Legacy, leadership, and a leadership legacy

AbstractThe nexus of legacy and leadership is an understudied area. Drawing on the legacy of leadership researcher, Professor Ken Parry, and incorporating several well supported themes of the phenomenon of leadership, the similarities between legacy and leadership are explored. Key themes include followership, sensemaking, change, context, the social influence process, and leadership as artifact.

The Mid-Twentieth Century Baby Boom and the Role of Social Influence. An Agent-Based Modelling Approach

Around the middle of the 20th century, most Western countries experienced a surge in birth rates, called the Baby Boom. This boom was unexpected at the time and the underlying mechanisms are still not entirely clear. It was characterized by high levels of inter- and intra-country variability in fertility, as some regions even experienced fertility decline during the Boom. In this paper, we suggest that social influence processes, propelling a shift towards two-child families, might have played an important role in the observed changes in fertility. Interactions in social networks can lead new types of childbearing behaviour to diffuse widely and thereby induce changes in fertility at the macro level. The emergence and diffusion of a two-child norm resulted in homogenization of fertility behaviour across regions. Overall, this led to a reduction of childlessness and thus an increase of fertility, as more people aspired to have at least two children. Yet, in those regions where larger family sizes were still common, the two-child norm contributed to a fertility decline. To explore the role of social influence with analytical rigor, we make use of agent-based computational modelling. We explicate the underlying behavioural assumptions in a formal model and assess their implications by submitting this model to computational simulation experiments. We use Belgium as a case study, since it exhibited large variability in fertility in a relatively small population during the Baby Boom years. We use census data to generate realistic starting conditions and to empirically validate the outcomes that our model generates. Our results show that the proposed mechanism could explain an important part of the variability of fertility trends during the Baby Boom era.

Self-Correcting Dynamics in Social Influence Processes

Social influence may lead individuals to choose what is popular over what is best. Whenever this happens, it further increases the popularity advantage of the inferior choice, compelling subsequent...

Hipsters on networks: How a minority group of individuals can lead to an antiestablishment majority.

The spread of opinions, memes, diseases, and “alternative facts” in a population depends both on the details of the spreading process and on the structure of the social and communication networks on which they spread. One feature that can change spreading dynamics substantially is heterogeneous behavior among different types of individuals in a social network. In this paper, we explore how antiestablishment nodes (e.g., hipsters) influence the spreading dynamics of two competing products. We consider a model in which spreading follows a deterministic rule for updating node states (which indicate which product has been adopted) in which an adjustable probability of the nodes in a network are hipsters, who choose to adopt the product that they believe is the less popular of the two. The remaining nodes are conformists, who choose which product to adopt by considering which products their immediate neighbors have adopted. We simulate our model on both synthetic and real networks, and we show that the hipsters have a major effect on the final fraction of people who adopt each product: even when only one of the two products exists at the beginning of the simulations, a small fraction of hipsters in a network can still cause the other product to eventually become the more popular one. To account for this behavior, we construct an approximation for the steady-state adoption fractions of the products on -regular trees in the limit of few hipsters. Additionally, our simulations demonstrate that a time delay in the knowledge of the product distribution in a population, as compared to immediate knowledge of product adoption among nearest neighbors, can have a large effect on the final distribution of product adoptions. Using a local-tree approximation, we derive an analytical estimate of the spreading of products and obtain good agreement if a sufficiently small fraction of the population consists of hipsters. In all networks, we find that either of the two products can become the more popular one at steady state, depending on the fraction of hipsters in the network and on the amount of delay in the knowledge of the product distribution. Our simple model and analysis may help shed light on the road to success for antiestablishment choices in elections, as such success—and qualitative differences in final outcomes between competing products, political candidates, and so on—can arise rather generically in our model from a small number of antiestablishment individuals and ordinary processes of social influence on normal individuals.

The effect of social influence and social interactions on the adoption of a new technology: The use of bike sharing in a student population

The present study investigates how social influence and social interactions can affect the adoption of new technologies, using stated preference (SP) survey data combined with an “accelerated reality” experience of social interaction among the respondents. Specifically, the intention to use a pro-environmental transport mode (the bike sharing) during a public transport strike within a cohort of students has been analysed. Previous studies have modelled social influence effects using SP data by providing a hypothetical scenario with simulated interactions or information about social conformity processes (i.e. social adoption) during the survey. In our paper, in addition to the impact of assumed social norms, the effect of live/real social interactions is included in the survey. SP survey is developed to investigate the effect of Level-of-Service attributes on the hypothetical choices in the scenario of a public transport strike. Besides the pre-defined attributes characterising the alternatives in the SP design, the survey includes techniques to acquire information on conformity and social interactions. Specifically, the interviewees undertake a before and after stated preference experiment (SP1 and SP2), with a period of group discussion in between the two parts. This SP experiment involves different cognitive and interpersonal mechanisms, such as the functional information exchange on benefits and drawbacks of cycling and bike sharing. The aim is to establish whether hypothetical scenarios of social conformity are different from real/live social interactions and whether these social influence processes actually affect the individuals' mode choice. A joint SP1/SP2 mixed logit (ML) model has been estimated to explore the choice behaviour of individuals and allows us to incorporate the inertia/propensity to change behaviour between SP1 and SP2. Moreover, considering the “Reflexive Layers of Influence” (RLI) framework, the processes generated by social interactions (diffusion, translation and reflexivity) are measured and incorporated in the model. We finally show the effect of these social influence variables on the goodness-of-fit of the models and choice simulation for prediction. We also draw conclusions about the value of such enhanced choice models in understanding and predicting the impacts of social interactions on choice behaviour in the context of new transport technologies.

Psychological situations illuminate the meaning of human behavior: Recent advances and application to social influence processes

AbstractPsychologists have long sought to understand how people experience, think, and communicate about situations. Psychology's protracted journey toward understanding psychological situations recently took a momentous turn toward more rigorous conceptualization and measurement of situational characteristics along multiple dimensions. We provide a selective review of recent developments in research on psychological situations and highlight the value that these recent contributions deliver for researchers interested in human cognition, emotion, and behavior. We illustrate this value with an application of insights and instruments from the CAPTION and DIAMONDS models to social influence processes in groups. Specifically, we demonstrate how utilizing validated multidimensional scales of situational characteristics can illuminate the psychological meaning of brokering behaviors. We conclude by discussing current challenges and promising future directions for research on psychological situations.

Enhance sentiment analysis on social networks with social influence analytics

Sentiment analysis on social networks has attracted increasing research attention. Most previous works rely on text mining and the phenomenon of Homophily reflected by explicit friendship relations, which are a weak assumption for modeling sentiment and opinion similarities. In this paper we show that competitive results can be achieved with consideration of implicit influence relationships. In particular, we use heterogeneous graphs to infer sentiment polarities at user-level. We show that information about social influence processes can be used to improve sentiment analysis. Our transductive learning results reveal that incorporating such information can indeed lead to statistically significant sentiment classification improvements.

Інститут сім’ї в міграційних процесах громадян України до Німеччини.

In the article the authors explore the migration processes of Ukrainian families to Germany. Under the influence of social processes, the Institute of the Family is one of the earliest to emerge; its role is crucial for both sociology and migration processes; it is a major carrier of cultural models because the rules, customs and traditions of family life are specific to each society. The ability to move freely is one of the most important values of modern life, which is why the migration issue is one of the most urgent issues for Ukraine as a donor country for large numbers of migrants.An attempt has been made to characterize the importance of the family institute in migration processes from Ukraine. The reason of transformation from the temporary migration to permanent is the unification of families of Ukrainians abroad who provisionally left earlier, but stayed for a long time in their host country and moved their families due to the deterioration of the living conditions in their homeland, and the opportunity of employment for their other family members.The study is based on official data and a sociological poll developed by the authors. The results of the study helped in analyzing the families of Ukrainian migrants, their activities outside the homeland, determining their adaptability to the new environment. Our research proves that Ukrainian migrants are a significant component of German society. By incorporating into communities and organizations, they have the support of each other which makes them less homesick and it gives the opportunity to communicate with people who have a full understanding of other migrants and their problems. Families are full units of modern society that shapes a new vision and understanding of the world of migrants.In this article the authors paid attention to the development and adaptation of Ukrainian families to the new environment of stay. Popular reasons of immigration to Germany have been identified and described. The authors outlined the main stages of functioning of Ukrainian migrant families in the context of adaptation.

Uncertainty and Social Influence

Much research documents that uncertainty is an important factor in the social influence process. We argue that there are two senses in which uncertainty plays a role. First, task uncertainty is a necessary but variable condition for social influence to occur. Second, uncertainty reduction is a mechanism producing social influence. We discuss how tasks can vary in the level of uncertainty they entail and how this impacts the mechanisms resulting in social influence. In this context, we predict that task uncertainty moderates social influence and that uncertainty reduction mediates it. We experimentally test our predictions in the status-to-social-influence process using standard means of studying social influence. Inconsistent with prior work, we do not find that task uncertainty is a moderator, but we do find evidence that uncertainty reduction functions as a mediator. Further, we find that the mediated effect is contingent on task uncertainty.

Fertility and Modernity

We investigate the historical dynamics of the decline in fertility in Europe and its relation to measures of cultural and ancestral distance. We test the hypothesis that the decline of fertility was associated with the diffusion of social and behavioral changes from France, in contrast with the spread of the Industrial Revolution, where England played a leading role. We argue that the diffusion of the fertility decline and the spread of industrialization followed different patterns because societies at different relative distances from the respective innovators (the French and the English) faced different barriers to imitation and adoption, and such barriers were lower for societies that were historically and culturally closer to the innovators. We provide a model of fertility choices in which the transition from higher to lower levels of fertility is the outcome of a process of social innovation and social influence, whereby late adopters observe and learn about the novel behaviors, norms and practices introduced by early adopters at the frontier. In the empirical analysis we study the determinants of marital fertility in a sample of European populations and regions from 1830 t0 1970, and successfully test our theoretical predictions using measures of genetic distance between European populations and a novel data set of ancestral linguistic distances between European regions.

Brokering Orientations and Social Capital: Influencing Others’ Relationships Shapes Status and Trust

Individuals often influence others’ relationships, for better or worse. We conceptualize social influence processes that impact others’ social networks as brokering, and advance a multifaceted model that explains how brokering behaviors can create, terminate, reinforce, and modify others’ network ties. To empirically study brokering, we introduce and validate the Brokering Orientations Scale (BOS), a multidimensional measure that captures individuals’ behavioral tendencies to act as intermediaries, conciliators, and dividers. Six studies (N=1,723) explored the psychometric properties of the BOS (Studies 1a-1c) and investigated the effects of distinct forms of brokering on brokers’ social capital (Studies 2-4). The intermediary, conciliatory and divisive brokering orientations related differently to extraversion, agreeableness, perspective-taking, moral identity and Machiavellianism, among other individual differences. The effects of brokering on social capital varied as a function of the brokering orientation and the aspect of social capital. Intermediary behavior garnered status; conciliatory behavior promoted trust and prestige; and divisive behavior fueled brokers’ perceived dominance. Overall, the current paper elucidates the concept of brokering orientations, introduces a novel measure of brokering orientations, and explains how brokering behavior shapes brokers’ social capital.

The anatomy of undue influence used by terrorist cults and traffickers to induce helplessness and trauma, so creating false identities

Summary There is a need to update the legal system to recognize the use of hypnosis and undue influence occurring throughout the world. Extremist groups are deceptively recruiting and indoctrinating people to do terrorist attacks. Human traffickers are grooming and using hypnosis and social influence techniques to create labor and sex slaves. In this paper, a number of key concepts and models will be used to more fully define DSM-5's Dissociative Disorder 300.15: Festinger's Cognitive Dissonance Theory, along with Robert Jay Lifton and Margaret Singer's work (1995) are the foundation of the BITE model of mind control (Hassan, 1988). Behavior, Information, Thought, and Emotional Control are the four overlapping components through which destructive groups bring people to be obedient and compliant to authority. A programmed cult identity is created through a complex social influence process. That false identity dominates real identity. The ethics and morality of undue influence are understood differently. In this paper, we analyze the techniques of breaking down the existing personalityand creating a false or pseudo-identity. The Influence Continuum and BITE mind control model and Lifton's eight criteria for Thought Reform are discussed; Scheflin's Social Influence Model (2015) is presented as one tool for analyzing undue influence in a forensic and juridical context. To support the hypothesis presented here, an anonymous online research survey was conducted involving 1033 participants to gather data regarding specific variables of the BITE model, in an effort to develop an instrument that might be useful in determining key aspects of undue influence.

The psychological effects of state socialization: IGO membership loss and respect for human rights

ABSTRACTWe present an interdisciplinary theory that considers how loss of membership in international organizations affects states’ human rights practices. Drawing mostly from social psychology and international relations research, we argue that states are socialized into the international community through a process of social influence, whereby they are incentivized to comply with group norms by the promise (threat) of social rewards (punishments). Social influence occurs when states form social bonds through interactions with other states. When social bonds are severed, fewer opportunities for social influence occur due to lower information to both the remaining states and the state that lost those social bonds. Thus, we hypothesize that the loss of membership from IGOs reduces incentives to comply with group norms and adversely affects human rights practices at home. A combination of propensity score matching/regression and autoregressive distributed lag (ADL) models on a global cross-section across the years 1978–2012 supports the theory. Specifically, losing at least one IGO membership leads to a long-run drop in human rights respect of about one quarter to one half standard deviation.

Differential effects of parent and peer presence on neural correlates of risk taking in adolescence.

Adolescence is a developmental period associated with increased health-risk behaviors and unique sensitivity to the input from the social context, paralleled by major changes in the developing brain. Peer presence increases adolescent risk taking, associated with greater reward-related activity, while parental presence decreases risk taking, associated with decreased reward-related activity and increased cognitive control. Yet the effects specific to peers and parents are still unknown. The current functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study compared within-person peer and parent influences on risky decision-making during adolescence (ages 12–15 years; N = 56). Participants completed the Yellow Light Game (YLG), a computerized driving task, during which they could make safe or risky decisions, in the presence of a peer and their parent. Behavioral findings revealed no effects of social context on risk taking. At the neural level, a collection of affective, social and cognitive regions [ventral striatum (VS), temporo-parietal junction (TPJ), and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC)] was more active during decision-making with peers than parents. Additionally, functional connectivity analyses showed greater coupling between affective, social and cognitive control regions (VS-insula, VS-TPJ) during decision-making with parents than peers. These findings highlight the complex nature of social influence processes in peer and parent contexts, and contribute to our understanding of the opportunities and vulnerabilities associated with adolescent social sensitivity.

Student Integration into STEM Careers and Culture: A Longitudinal Examination of Summer Faculty Mentors and Project Ownership.

It is widely recognized that the United States needs to attract and retain more people in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) careers. Intensive undergraduate research experiences (UREs) are one of the few strategies shown to improve longitudinal student interest and persistence in STEM-related career pathways; however, less is known about the underlying process linking activities to positive outcomes. The tripartite integration model of social influences (TIMSI) provides a framework for understanding the social influence processes by which students integrate into STEM careers and culture. The current study used a longitudinal design and latent growth curve modeling to examine and predict the development of scientific research career persistence intentions over the course of an intensive summer URE. The latent growth curve analysis showed that student persistence intentions declined and rebounded over the course of the summer. Furthermore, the positive impact of faculty mentor role modeling on growth trajectories was mediated through internalization of science community values. In addition, project ownership was found to buffer students from the typical trend of declining and rebounding persistence intentions. The TIMSI framework illuminates the contextual features and underlying psychological processes that link UREs to student integration into STEM careers and culture.