Summary Social influence articles

Social influence
ARTICLES

Article 1: Fluency and Social Influence

Describing undesirable behaviour as common, can actually increase the
frequency of this behaviour, rather than reducing it. This mechanism has to do
with processing fluency:
 Content of thoughts prior to judgment is a determinant of later judgments
and behaviour
 The ease or difficulty of generating those thoughts is also a critical
determinant of later judgment and behaviour
 It’s about the ease or difficulty of:
 Thoughts
 Images
 Processing information
 Making a decision
Failure to take this processing information into account makes influence attempt
useless.

1. Fluency and social consensus
‘If it sounds familiar, it must be popular’
We’re poor at tracking how often we’ve heard or seen things (estimating
frequencies). Instead, we rely on whether something seems familiar. If it
does, than we probably have seen or heard it before.
To infer a norm, people draw on the experiences of familiarity, but are
insensitive to where this fluency experience comes from. This means that
we are often influenced by fluency that is unrelated to the actual
frequency.

2. Fluency and truth
‘If it sounds familiar, it must be true’
Variables that facilitate fluent processing create the impression that a
certain statement is true. For example: rhyme, repetition, contrasting
background, etc. This can be a problem when we try to attempt to counter
misleading information: this is often done by first saying out loud the
untrue statement and then the counter argument. But when the memories
of the substantive details fade, someone may be increasingly influenced
by the familiarity of the misleading information  perceiving it as a truth.
A solution would be;
o Trying to make the true information as fluent and familiar as possible
o Making mnemonic links between an ad and a counterargument

3. Fluency and risk
‘If it’s hard to pronounce, it must be dangerous’
Familiar options feel safer than unfamiliar ones: they will feel less risky and
less threatening. Research shows that food additive that are easier to
pronounce, are seen as less harmful than hard-to-pronounce additives. In
amusement parks, difficult-to-pronounce rides are seen as more exiting
and a bigger chance to feel sick afterwards. The implications of these facts
is that in some domains risk is valued, and dysfluency is good, while in
other domains risk is undesirable and dysfluency is bad.

4. Fluency and future expectations

, ‘If it’s hard to imagine, it won’t happen’
We tend to grossly mispredict the future. One reason for this is the
experience of fluency. For instance, we feel less vulnerable for diseases
that are hard to pronounce. If we find it hard to imagine something will
happen to us, or we will behave in a certain way in the future, the less
likely we are to actually engage in this behaviour. The implications for the
advertisement world: if the advertisement is about something that we can
hardly imagine, it can even backfire and produce the opposite of the
intended effect.

5. Fluency and expected effort
‘If it’s hard to read, it’s hard to do’
Tasks in easy-to-read fonts are seen as less effortless to complete.
Research showed that a physical exercise in a hard to read font was
perceived longer and was less likely to be incorporated in people’s
routines. The implication of this is that when you want people to adopt new
behaviour in their routines, you must this pronounce this behaviour in a
perceptually easy to process way. Another implication is that dysfluency
can be good if the goal is to create the perception of effort (for instance:
restaurant dishes).

6. Fluency and commitment
When giving people choice backfires
Experiences in difficulty making a decision can have negative effects, even
in the case of only two choices. People find it very difficult to make trade-
offs in quality, price, etc. The consequences of these difficulties in making
trade-offs are:
o Decision paralysis
o Choice deferral
o Lower satisfaction with a decision
o Switching to the different option later
o Reducing motivation and commitment to the choice
This feeling of difficulty can even be influenced by the print in which the
choices are presented. Choices in difficult-to-read fonts are perceived as
difficult to make choices. People are insensitive where these feelings of
ease or difficulty are coming from, therefore they misattribute these
feelings to whatever is in their focus of attention. This is ruled out when
you make people aware where these feelings are actually coming from.

7. Fluency and liking
We like what is easy on the mind
The mere exposure effect  the more often we see an object, the more we
become to like it. So, when a preceding semantic prime comes before a
stimulus, this will facilitate it’s processing, increasing our liking of the
product. Fluency of processing feels good, and is seen in symmetry,
Gestalt laws, prototypical faces, etc. Another implication is that beauty and
truth go hand in hand.

8. Fluency and processing style
Do I need to think twice?
Fluency can also influence how we think. Difficult-to-read fonts leads to
more abstract thinking. Fluency also influences how carefully we consider
the information at hand. For example, the Moses illusion  is more likely
to be detected in a difficult-to-read font than in an easy-to-read font.

, Fluency influences judgment in two ways:
1. Serving as a source of information
2. Changing how information is represented and processed.
Conclusions:
 People may attribute experiences of fluency to other aspects of an object
or behaviour
 People draw on naïve theories to infer the meaning of encountered
difficulty
 Fluency elicits positive affect
 Fluency influences how information is processed and increases heuristic
thinking