This review covers recent developments in the social influence literature, focusing primarily on compliance and conformity research published between 1997 and 2002. The principles and processes underlying a target's susceptibility to outside influences are considered in light of three goals fundamental to rewarding human functioning. Specifically, targets are motivated to form accurate perceptions of reality and react accordingly, to develop and preserve meaningful social relationships, and to maintain a favorable self-concept. Consistent with the current movement in compliance and conformity research, this review emphasizes the ways in which these goals interact with external forces to engender social influence processes that are subtle, indirect, and outside of awareness.

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Social Influence: Compliance and Conformity

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The Psychology of Sunk Cost

Do we consciously cause our actions, or do they happen to us? Philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, theologians, and lawyers have long debated the existence of free will versus determinism. In this book Daniel Wegner offers a novel understanding of the issue. Like actions, he argues, the feeling of conscious will is created by the mind and brain. Yet if psychological and neural mechanisms are responsible for all human behavior, how could we have conscious will? The feeling of conscious will, Wegner shows, helps us to appreciate and remember our authorship of the things our minds and bodies do. Yes, we feel that we consciously will our actions, Wegner says, but at the same time, our actions happen to us. Although conscious will is an illusion, it serves as a guide to understanding ourselves and to developing a sense of responsibility and morality. Approaching conscious will as a topic of psychological study, Wegner examines the issue from a variety of angles. He looks at illusions of the will -- those cases where people feel that they are willing an act that they are not doing or, conversely, are not willing an act that they in fact are doing. He explores conscious will in hypnosis, Ouija board spelling, automatic writing, and facilitated communication, as well as in such phenomena as spirit possession, dissociative identity disorder, and trance channeling. The result is a book that sidesteps endless debates to focus, more fruitfully, on the impact on our lives of the illusion of conscious will.

The Illusion of Conscious Will

This study addressed the ill-understood issue of how loyalty develops in service patrons. Although many theorists hold commitment to be an essential part of this process, the link between commitment and loyalty has received little empirical attention. To address this void, the study first portrayed commitment’s root tendency to resist changing preference as a function of three antecedent processes. Second, this portrayal formed the basis for developing a psychometrically sound scale to measure the construct of commitment. Third, the scale was then used in a mediating effects model (M-E-M) to test the commitment-loyalty link. Path analyses found this parsimonious structure to be a significant improvement over rival direct effects models (D-E-Ms). Results found the tendency to resist changing preference to be a key precursor to loyalty, largely explained by a patron’s willingness to identify with a brand. Implications of these findings for loyalty’s development and research are explored.

Analyzing the commitment-loyalty link in service contexts

The authors present an overview of the academic literature on charitable giving based on a literature review of more than 500 articles. They structure their review around the central question of why people donate money to charitable organizations. They identify eight mechanisms as the most important forces that drive charitable giving: (a) awareness of need; (b) solicitation; (c) costs and benefits; (d) altruism; (e) reputation; (f) psychological benefits; (g) values; (h) efficacy. These mechanisms can provide a basic theoretical framework for future research explaining charitable giving.

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A Literature Review of Empirical Studies of Philanthropy: Eight Mechanisms That Drive Charitable Giving

University of Notre DameJohn A. MillerOhio State UniversityThe low-ball technique, a tactic often used by automobile sales dealers toproduce compliance from customers, was examined in a set of three experi-ments. In all three studies, a requester who induced subjects to make aninitial decision to perform a target behavior and who then made performanceof the behavior more costly obtained greater final compliance than a requesterwho informed subjects of the full costs of the target behavior from the outset.The low-ball phenomenonthat an active preliminary decision to take anaction tends to persevere even after the costs of performing the action havebeen increasedwas found to be reliable (Experiment 1), different from thefoot-in-the-door effect (Experiment 2), and effective only when the preliminarydecision was made with a high degree of choice (Experiment 3). In competi-tion with three other conceptual explanations, a formulation based on the con-cept of commitment was seen to best account for the results. An ecologicallyderived strategy for the identification and investigation of research questionswas used and discussed.Social psychologists have recently begun toexamine the effects of a variety of factors onthe likelihood that one person will complywith a request from another (cf. Cialdini &Schroeder, 1976). These investigations havegenerally used a similar epistemological se-quence in attempting to uncover the psycho-logical processes that influence compliancebehavior. Typically, factors likely to affectthe tendency to comply with a request havebeen identified on the basis of existing psy-chological theory. Once selected in this man-ner, the variables are submitted to experi-mental test to determine whether they doinfluence compliance probabilities accordingto prediction.

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John A. Miller

Papers

Low-ball procedure for producing compliance: Commitment then cost.