Normative reconstruction and social memory: Honneth and Ricoeur

Normative reconstruction is a form of immanent critique which judges society in terms of values which are already institutionalized and implicitly expressed across everyday forms of interaction. Honneth, for his part, reads the value of social freedom into the normative grammar of modern institutions and anticipates further advances towards its institutionalization. Many have voiced doubts over the extent to which the model of normative reconstruction which Honneth proposes is solidly anchored in social reality: at worst, it is argued, this reality is resistant to reconstruction in terms of the value of social freedom; at best, it is too susceptible to multiple readings to allow for such a reconstruction. I seek to respond to these charges, while also testing the reach of Ricoeur’s understanding of the philosophical anthropological idea of indebtedness to the past, by following up on Honneth’s appeal to a horizon of social memory in response to his own uncertainties over the viability of normative reconstruction. More generally, I seek to arrive at a better understanding of the capacity of memory to orientate social critique within a shifting historical landscape.

     

Therapeutic social influence: sternly strike while the iron is hot

Two studies tested social influence options in symbolic modeling therapy. The first gave a pretreatment interview in which the therapist behaved in a “warm” or “businesslike” manner, and then urged the clients to approach a snake as closely as possible when (immediately afterward) they repeated a prior runway BAT and fear assessment. The “businesslike” group reported less fear than the “warm” group, but differential therapist perceptions did not affect overt avoidance. Study 2 compared directive social influence or its omission when clients performed approach immediately vs. the next week. The strongest BAT gains occurred if social influence was followed by prompt execution of the relevant task, but these differences were not maintained after treatment. The data suggested that timing is critical for applying social influence, which should be given immediately before task demands. Continued efforts to capitalize on initial differences might sustain socially-influenced gains for enduring treatment purposes.     

Forewarned is forearmed: Conserving self-control strength to resist social influence

Recent research has shown that resisting persuasion involves active self-regulation. Resisting an influence attempt consumes self-regulatory resources, and in a state of self-regulatory resource depletion, people become more susceptible to (unwanted) influence attempts. However, the present studies show that a forewarning of an impending influence attempt prompts depleted individuals to conserve what is left of their regulatory resources and thus promotes self-regulatory efficiency. As a result, when these individuals are subsequently confronted with a persuasive request, they comply less (Experiments 1 and 3), and generate more counterarguments (Experiment 2) than their depleted counterparts who were not forewarned and thus did not conserve their resources, and they are as able as non-depleted participants to resist persuasion.     

Interdependent sampling and social influence

Most explanations of social influence focus on why individuals might want to agree with the opinions or attitudes of others. The authors propose a different explanation that assumes the attitudes of others influence only the activities and objects individuals are exposed to. For example, individuals are likely to be exposed to activities that their friends enjoy. The authors demonstrate that such influence over sampling behavior is sufficient to produce a social influence effect when individuals form attitudes by learning from experience. Even if the experiences of 2 individuals, when they sample an object or event, are independent random variables, their attitudes will become positively correlated if their sampling processes are interdependent. Interdependent sampling of activities thus provides a different explanation of social influence with distinct empirical and theoretical implications.     

Neural mechanisms of social influence

The present investigation explores the neural mechanisms underlying the impact of social influence on preferences. We socially tagged symbols as valued or not – by exposing participants to the preferences of their peers – and assessed subsequent brain activity during an incidental processing task in which participants viewed popular, unpopular, and novel symbols. The medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) differentiated between symbols that were and were not socially tagged – a possible index of normative influence – while aspects of the striatum (the caudate) differentiated between popular and unpopular symbols – a possible index of informational influence. These results suggest that integrating activity in these two brain regions may differentiate objects that have become valued as a result of social influence from those valued for non-social reasons.     

A protean approach to social influence: Dark Triad personalities and social influence tactics

To avoid detection, those high on Dark Triad traits (i.e., narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism) may adopt a protean approach to interpersonal influence. We show the Dark Triad traits correlate with a number of unique tactics of influence (Study 1; N = 259). We show this protean approach was insensitive to differences in targets of manipulation (Study 2; N = 296). When forced to choose one tactic to solve different adaptive problems, the Dark Triad traits were correlated with unique tactical choices (Study 3; N = 268). We show these associations are generally robust to controlling for the Big Five and participants’ sex (Study 1 and 2). We discuss the theoretical implications of these findings for both life history and cheater-detection theories.     

Minority influence and social categorization

In this article, a theoretical distinction is proposed between representative outgroup minorities (representative of a minority category in the society, e.g. gays) and dissident outgroup minorities (defined as a minority subgroup within a larger outgroup category). Two studies are reported comparing the social influence of dissident outgroup minorities with that of ingroup minorities (belonging to the subject's own social category). It was predicted that a position advocated by a dissident outgroup minority would be more readily accepted than that of an ingroup minority, but that the ingroup minority would be more likely to elicit the generation of new, alternative solutions. A first experiment in which subjects were either exposed to an ingroup minority, an outgroup minority, or no influence source confirmed these predictions. In a second experiment, subjects were either exposed to a majority or to a minority source either belonging to the subject's own social category or to the outgroup. The results indicate that the position of an ingroup majority was readily accepted whereas the otherwise identical message of an outgroup majority was rejected; neither ingroup nor outgroup majority stimulated the development of alternative proposals. Again, in line with Nemeth' (1986a) theory, the position of an ingroup minority was rejected but stimulated the generation of new, alternative proposals. The differential role of social category membership in minority and majority influence and the applicability of Nemeth' (1986a) theory to the attitude change area are discussed.     

Normative goals and the regulation of social behavior: The case of respect

The rational actor model has a long and successful history of explaining human motivation across several disciplinary fields, but its focus on material self-interest fails to explain the many courtesies that people extend to each other and the frequent sacrifices they make on a day-to-day basis. What promotes this pro-social behavior—in particular trust in other people? I argue that interpersonal trust is supported by normative goals, in that people trust others, even complete strangers, because of a sense of what they ought to do, by social rules and obligations they feel they must follow. In particular, people feel they must respect the character of the other person, constrained to act as though the other individual is an honorable human being, irrespective of what they may privately believe. I describe how respect underlies trust in economic games as well as pro-social behavior in other social settings. This focus on normative goals, such as respect, suggests that people do not always act in alignment with their expectations, regulate themselves in terms their actions rather than possible outcomes of those actions, and choose pro-social action not out of desire to benefit others as much as a simple acquiescence to situational demands.     

Situating social influence processes: dynamic, multidirectional flows of influence within social networks.

Social psychologists have studied the psychological processes involved in persuasion, conformity, and other forms of social influence, but they have rarely modeled the ways influence processes play out when multiple sources and multiple targets of influence interact over time. However, workers in other fields from sociology and economics to cognitive science and physics have recognized the importance of social influence and have developed models of influence flow in populations and groups-generally without relying on detailed social psychological findings. This article reviews models of social influence from a number of fields, categorizing them using four conceptual dimensions to delineate the universe of possible models. The goal is to encourage interdisciplinary collaborations to build models that incorporate the detailed, microlevel understanding of influence processes derived from focused laboratory studies but contextualized in ways that recognize how multidirectional, dynamic influences are situated in people's social networks and relationships.     

Network models for social influence processes

This paper generalizes thep* class of models for social network data to predict individual-level attributes from network ties. Thep* model for social networks permits the modeling of social relationships in terms of particular local relational or network configurations. In this paper we present methods for modeling attribute measures in terms of network ties, and so constructp* models for the patterns of social influence within a network. Attribute variables are included in a directed dependence graph and the Hammersley-Clifford theorem is employed to derive probability models whose parameters can be estimated using maximum pseudo-likelihood. The models are compared to existing network effects models. They can be interpreted in terms of public or private social influence phenomena within groups. The models are illustrated by an empirical example involving a training course, with trainees' reactions to aspects of the course found to relate to those of their network partners.This research was supported by grants from the Australian Research Council. The authors would like to acknowledge the help of Stanley Wasserman, Janice Langan-Fox and Larry Hubert, and would like to thank four anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the North American Conference of the Psychometric Society, Lawrence, Kansas, June, 1999, and at the Australasian Mathematical Psychology Conference, Brisbane, Australia, December 1999.     

Intragroup social influence and intergroup competition

Three experiments examined the role of intragroup social influence in intergroup competition. In the context of a mutual fate control situation, participants in Experiment 1 demonstrated more intergroup competition in the presence than in the absence of social support for shared self-interest. Experiment 2 revealed that, in the context of a Prisoner's Dilemma Game, this social support effect was stronger when noncorrespondence of outcomes between the interacting groups was low than when it was high. Results from Experiment 3 were consistent with the possibility that the effect of social support is attenuated when noncorrespondence of outcomes is high because under these circumstances intergroup competition is prescribed by a norm of group interest. The implications of these findings for understanding the antecedents of interindividual-intergroup discontinuity are discussed.     

Identity and influence in social interaction

Researchers studying argumentation often make the simplifying assumption that rational persuasion can be studied independently from the processes through which social identities are established and maintained. However, developments in the study of message design, particularly the groundbreaking work of Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987) on politeness, suggests that in practice the multiple functions of messages are intertwined in message structure and effects. In contrast to the view that identity issues distort rational processes in communication, both the communication of identity and the use of identity-based appeals in social influence are best seen as prototypical examples of rationality in message design.     

The burden of social proof: shared thresholds and social influence

Social influence rises with the number of influence sources, but the proposed relationship varies across theories, situations, and research paradigms. To clarify this relationship, I argue that people share some sense of where the "burden of social proof" lies in situations where opinions or choices are in conflict. This suggests a family of models sharing 2 key parameters, one corresponding to the location of the influence threshold, and the other reflecting its clarity--a factor that explains why discrete "tipping points" are not observed more frequently. The plausibility and implications of this account are examined using Monte Carlo and cellular automata simulations and the relative fit of competing models across classic data sets in the conformity, group deliberation, and social diffusion literatures.     

Studies in social influence: II. Instrumental and symbolic influence

In this article we have dealt with a critical analysis pertaining to the notion of the informational influence. We hereby show that in every inter-actionary situation, the judgments emitted by the source (influence agent) appear to contain informations on the judged objects from their elementary content and, at the same time, from their organisation, like indications on the source itself, on its purpose. In this manner, we have come to distinguish the instrumental influence from the symbolical influence. An experiment where the subjects have to judge the number of points appearing on the slides shows that this distinction reveals what happens in the process of influence.     

Normative Requirements

Normative requirements are often overlooked, but they are central features of the normative world. Rationality is often thought to consist in acting for reasons, but following normative requirements is also a major part of rationality. In particular, correct reasoning – both theoretical and practical – is governed by normative requirements rather than by reasons. This article explains the nature of normative requirements, and gives examples of their importance. It also describes mistakes that philosophers have made as a result of confusing normative requirements with reasons.     

Sex differences in susceptibility to social influence

Sex differences in compliance and persuasiveness were examined while varying the sex-role relevance of the stimulus. Undergraduate students were asked to respond to opinion statements previously discussed by a fictitious group. Subjects read the group's unanimous opinion accompanying each statement and were told they would participate in a discussion with this group. Some subjects responded to statements about female sex-role relevant activities and others to statements about male sex-role relevant activities. Sex of influence source was manipulated by showing subjects all male or all female names of group members. Compliance was measured by the extent to which a subject's response approximated the group's opinion. The results show that males were more compliant than females when the stimulus statements concerned female sex-role-related activities and that females were more easily influenced when they responded to statements about male sex-role-related activities. Further, subjects were somewhat more easily persuaded by women on female sex-role-related activities and more influenced by men's opinions on issues relevant for males.In most of the social influence literature, alterations in a subject's behavior in an experimental situation has been termed conformity. However, conformity may involve either private acceptance or overt alterations in behavior without cognitive change (i.e., compliance). Throughout this article the term compliance refers to shifts in behavior toward an immediate and transitory social influence (Sherif & Sherif, 1969, p. 191).