Normative Influence Group Decision Making

In group-decision making we often look upon each other to come to a conclusion. Two major influences seem to play and important role: 1st the normative influenced, what is the need to be accepted and to belong. This leads to compliance. 2nd is the informational influence, what is the need to get it right and to gain information. Deutsch and Gerard (1955) describe this in their 'dual-process dependency model '. Tajfel and Turner (1979) add with their social identity theory that apart from the personal identity, an individual has multiple social identities. The social identity is the individuals self-concept derived from the perceived membership of social groups. If a person sees himself as part as a group this person will try to achieve positive …show more content…
People want to belong to a group and therefore want to make a favourable impression to the other group members. This often includes to publicly agree with the norms of the group regardless of ones own private opinions. This behaviour is called compliance. This behaviour unfortunately also inhibits the danger that other members o the group will not be corrected and do not learn. Asch (1951) wanted to demonstrate the power of social influence by getting participants to conform by complying with an obviously incorrect answer, simply because the rest of the group did the same. 123 male students where put into groups of between 7 and 9 and seated around a table. They were then asked to match the single line on the first card with the line same length of one of the three comparison lines on the second card. In the experiment some of the participants were actually confederates and gave obvious wrong answers. The naïve participants gave the same incorrect answer as a group in 32% of all trails. Only 26% of naïve participants remained independent, despite the group pressure to conform. Many participants later on described their reasons for conforming to group norms and explained that they don 't wanted to 'appear different ' or 'be made to look a fool '. Still, to see if anonymity would influence conformity Crutchfield (1955) replicated Ash 's work, but so, that …show more content…
In contrast to normative influence - where the individual fears rejection – the individual now seeks approval and self-esteem from his/her fellow group member, by strongly identifying with other group members and group norms. This way individuals are less likely to listen to arguments from people outside of the groups, regardless of them being reasonable or not. Abrams et al. (1990) conducted a study to find out how social identity can influence a persons likelihood to conform. They replicated Asch 's original study from 1951, but this time used confederates of two different kinds: 1. Psychology students who the participants who were also psychology students could identify with, for the in-group condition and ancient history students for the out-group condition. Participants could state their answer publicly and privately. The overall conformity was 32%, very similar to the conformity in Asch 's experiment. The maximum of conformity was achieved in the in-group public condition with a mean number of conforming responses of 5.23. In the out-group public condition conformity was at the lowest with a mean of 0.75. The in-group private and out-group private conditions, on the other hand, did not differ significantly with means of 3.00 and 2.33. The study shows a significantly more likelihood of people to listen to in-group members and raises to question how groups could possibly make important