This document discusses social influence and groupthink. It summarizes that (1) people are strongly influenced by the opinions of the majority, even when the majority is obviously wrong. This effect is difficult to counteract. (2) Normative influence refers to understanding social expectations, while informational influence means seeing others' opinions as evidence. (3) Various applications aim to increase normative influence, like showing rankings, reviews, and others' opinions on social media, but this can distort individual decision-making.

1. Social Information
(psychology)
by: Malcolm Jackson, Kyongho Kim, Kenny
Rosenberg, & Erin Stratos

2. Asch 1956
● Even obviously incorrect judgments from the
majority influenced individuals
● This effect was strong and hard to
counteract

3. Group Influence on Individual
Judgment
● Normative Influence: Information about
what the expectations are in a given
situation
● Informational Influence: Counting others'
opinions as evidence in making a judgment
-Deutsch and Gerard

4. Using Normative and Informational
Influence
What use can be made of this effect?
Getting a desired behavior performed
How can we induce it to get that?

5. Design Application: Ranking
- Expose other
purchasers' decisions.
Ranking helps users make
decisions when purchasing
products but at the same time, it
influences on the distortion of
users' own decision if they have
their own.

6. Design Application: Customer Reviews
Most e-commerce website shows the customer reviews showing how
many people and how much they like it. It can influence customers'
choices even when they already made their decisions before reading
the reviews. The worse reviews, the less sales.

7. Design Application: Group opinions
Facebook - Event Going
- Show other members'
opinions

8. Design Application: Group opinions
Facebook - Event Going
- Show other members'
opinions
How to increase
normative social
influence?

9. Design Application: Group opinions
Facebook - Event Going
- Show other members'
opinions
How to increase
normative social
influence?
- automatically opt users
into events

10. The Majority Opinion Effect:
● Increases error
● Is persistent
● Creates self-doubt and fear

11. Asch's Post-Study Interviews
"... at first I thought I was right, then I became convinced
that the other seven couldn't be wrong."
"They might feel I was just trying to be out of the ordinary ...
they might think it was stubborn of me."
"I was standing out as a sore thumb."

12. What to do?
"Unless groups encourage their members to
express their own, independent judgments,
group consensus is likely to be an empty
achievement."
- Deutsch & Gerard

13. Management Application:
Brainstorming
● Traditional meetings
○ Agenda Items
○ Experts
○ Stakeholders
● Issues
○ Lack of participation
○ Difficult for minority opinion to be heard

14. Management Application:
Brainstorming
● Brainstorming instead of meetings
○ Many creative ideas
○ Build on ideas
● Risks
○ Free riding
○ Early consensus on an idea
○ Evaluation apprehension
○ Difficulty generating new ideas

15. Management Application:
Brainstorming
Recommendations:
● Hold brainstorm without experts and managers
● If not, ask them to be observers
● Ask participants to prepare ideas independently
● Break out into groups
● Be flexible and choose methods wisely

16. What We've Learned:
Pressure from the majority is strong.
We can take advantage of this, for good or evil.
Or we can work against it!
We have to be creative in our solutions.

17. fin.