Need help with my writing homework on What are the Different Forms of Social Influence. Write a 1250 word paper answering; Compliance refers to a positive and submissive reaction or response to an implicit request which can be made through advertising or an explicit request which can be made through a foot-in-the-door technique. The person to whom the request is being made may not necessarily know that the request is meant to influence his/her behavior or attitude. Identification is a phenomenon where a person’s opinion, attributes and behavior about an attribute, property or aspect changes and the person partially or fully transforms due to the influence of someone who he/she likes. Identification involves a psychological process with a sequence of identifications specified and constituted by the person who is liked. Identification type of social influence emanates from the concepts of primary identification, secondary education/ narcissism and partial secondary identification (Freud 1993, p.109). Internalization is a type of social influence phenomenon where a person publicly or privately accepts a set of norms that affect him/her and were established by individual people or groups. The three types of social influence can take different forms, such as conformity, leadership, socialization, persuasion, obedience and peer pressure (Goethals and Sorenson 2006, p.107). This essay discusses examples of social influence forms and looks at how psychologists have studied social influence forms, and discuss the rationale of social influence and social psychology.Conformity is considered the most common form of social influence. It involves a change in a person’s belief, line of thinking or behavior to fit in or align oneself with generally accepted normative standards. There are two variants of conformity, namely. normative conformity and social proof/ informational conformity. Informational conformity shares the concepts of internalization type of the social influence. A case example of conformity is seen in a case where a person agrees to drink alcohol due to peer pressure so that he/ she may maintain a positive relationship with his/her peers (Cialdini and Goldstein 2004, p.606). Minority influence is another form of social influence where a majority group in a certain situation accepts or conforms to a minority group’s influence because of situational factors such as the affluence or social importance of the minority group. A self-fulfilling prophecy is a form of social influence that involves a person making a prediction that may become true either directly or indirectly basing on the positive behavioral and belief feedback that it receives.
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