1 Psychology and human development1.10 Social psychology
1.10.2 Leadership, social influence, power and obedience
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Written by Resident Doctor Committee · Published
Leadership styles
Leadership influences and coordinates a group towards shared goals.
Style | Who decides | Typical effects |
|---|---|---|
Autocratic | The leader decides and instructs | Fast under supervision, low satisfaction, work decays once the leader leaves |
Persuasive | The leader decides, then moves the group to a shared goal by argument, enthusiasm and consensus, without coercion | Commitment to shared goals without shared control |
Participative (democratic) | The leader involves members in shaping the decision and supports their contribution | Slower, quality equal or better, output continues without the leader |
Laissez-faire | The leader abdicates direction | Least work and poorest quality of Lewin's three leadership climates; informal leaders emerge |
Informational and normative influence
Informational influence (Deutsch and Gerard) is accepting others' knowledge as evidence, and it changes private belief.
Normative influence is going along with others to be accepted and avoid rejection, and it changes public behaviour.
Ambiguity promotes informational change, whereas public responding favours normative compliance.
Bases of social power
French and Raven's power bases depend on the relationship: a reward confers little power if the target does not want it.
Base | Rests on | Clinical instance |
|---|---|---|
Reward | Giving something the target values in exchange for compliance | Leave, privileges |
Coercive | Punishing non-compliance or taking away something already held | Cancelled leave, lost freedom to choose shifts |
Legitimate | A recognised position in a hierarchy that entitles the holder to direct others | The responsible clinician's statutory role |
Expert | The target's belief that the source has superior knowledge or skill, with no reasons needed | Prescribing knowledge |
Referent | Liking, admiration and identification with the influencer | The trusted key worker |
Informational | The persuasive content of the message itself | Explaining how a drug works |
Informational power, added by Raven (1965), works because the target accepts the argument as their own, so the change persists without reference to the source.
Expert power differs because it rests on trust in the source's knowledge, not on the message.
Reward power offers something new, whereas coercive power makes keeping an existing benefit conditional.
Connection power, a later addition to the list, is influence borrowed from the agent's ties to someone influential.
Cialdini's principles of influence
Principle | How it works | Example or condition |
|---|---|---|
Commitment and consistency | People act to stay consistent with what they have already committed to | An active, self-made written commitment; the foot-in-the-door technique |
Reciprocity | A concession prompts a concession in return | Door-in-the-face: after a large request is refused, the smaller one feels like a concession |
Scarcity | An opportunity seems more valuable because it may be lost | Limited places and a short deadline |
Authority | People defer to perceived experts without new evidence | A title or white coat |
Liking | People agree more readily with someone they like | Compliments and shared interests |
Social proof | People infer correct behaviour from what similar others are doing | Strongest under uncertainty |
Conformity
Conformity is publicly matching a group's view through normative pressure while possibly disagreeing privately, without anyone making an explicit request.
In Asch's line-judgement studies, a unanimously wrong majority drew conformity on about a third (37%) of critical trials, against under 1% errors in controls.
Factor | Effect on conformity |
|---|---|
Group size | Rises steeply from one to three confederates, then plateaus |
Unanimity | One dissenter breaking it cuts conformity sharply, even if the dissenter is wrong |
Ambiguity or uncertainty | The strongest condition raising it, because the group becomes a source of information |
Public responding | Much higher than in private |
Majority status | Higher when the majority has high status or seems expert |
Culture | Higher in collectivist cultures |
The individual | Higher in naive members; lower with intelligence, self-esteem, high status and self-reliance |
Minority influence (Moscovici) depends above all on the consistency of the minority's position over time, and tends to produce private conversion rather than public agreement.
Idiosyncrasy credit (Hollander) gives latitude to a deviant with status, a record of past conformity and abilities the group needs; cohesion and clearly restated norms reduce this tolerance.
Obedience
Obedience is acting on a direct order from a perceived legitimate authority, whereas conformity involves no order.
In Milgram's studies, volunteers believed they were shocking a learner for errors, and despite protests about two thirds (65%) gave the maximum 450 volts in the baseline condition.
The agentic state is Milgram's account that people transfer responsibility to a legitimate authority, and the experimenter's offer to take responsibility invites it.
Factor | Effect on obedience |
|---|---|
Prestigious setting | Increases it |
Authority further away | Reduces it |
Victim further away | Increases it; voice, sight and contact reduce it |
Surveillance | Increases it |
Gradual 15-volt increments | Ease escalation |
Dissenting peers | Sharply reduce it |
Crowds and group performance
Deindividuation is loss of individual identity and personal accountability, with reduced self-awareness and weakened restraint, produced by anonymity within a large, aroused group.
Le Bon's crowd theory names three processes, submergence, contagion and suggestibility, which turn individuals into an irrational collective mind.
Social identity theory, which is better supported, holds that shared identity and norms produce selective, patterned crowd action.
Social loafing is reduced individual effort on a pooled task; it grows with group size and recovers once contributions are identifiable.
Social facilitation (Zajonc) is the mere presence of others improving performance on simple, well-learned tasks and impairing newly learned ones, because raised arousal strengthens the dominant response.
Group structure and cohesion
Group cohesion is a group's sense of "we-ness" and of pulling together towards a shared goal, and it is a therapeutic factor in group psychotherapy.
Role ambiguity, uncertainty about who does what and how performance is judged, reduces cohesion.
A sociogram, from Moreno's sociometric method, charts members' choices of one another, showing stars chosen by many and isolates chosen by none.
Group polarisation
Group polarisation is discussion pushing a group to a more extreme position in the direction its members already leaned, towards caution or risk, with no new information.
The risky shift (Stoner, choice-dilemma problems) is the risk-specific case, in which a group accepts a longer-odds gamble after discussion than its members would alone.
Normative influence drives polarisation through the wish to be accepted and social comparison.
Informational influence drives it as members accept new arguments supporting the prevailing view as correct.
Groupthink
Groupthink (Janis) is a cohesive group putting consensus and harmony ahead of realistic appraisal.
Element | Content |
|---|---|
Antecedents | Cohesion, insulation from outside views, homogeneous membership, group loyalty, stress from task pressure, directive or non-impartial leadership such as a leader stating a preferred outcome early |
Symptoms | Invulnerability, rationalisation, moral certainty, stereotyped opponents, pressure on dissenters, self-censorship, illusion of unanimity, mindguards |
Resulting decisions | Few alternatives, unexamined risks, no contingency plans |
Safeguards | A devil's advocate, an impartial leader who withholds a preference until the group has discussed the problem, outsiders, a second review, anything opening the group to dissent |