A Multidisciplinary Framework of Information Propagation Online by Susannah B. F. Paletz & Brooke E. Auxier & Ewa M. Golonka

Author:Susannah B. F. Paletz & Brooke E. Auxier & Ewa M. Golonka
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030164133
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

5.2 Norms and Comparisons Within a Social Group

Another important aspect of the social context that may influence each of the other factors involved in whether people share information is the perception of what others believe. Certain messages and narratives may be more persuasive simply because of the presence of others who believe them, particularly socially important others (e.g., Paluck & Shepherd, 2012). Normative social influence occurs when individuals are persuaded by observing the actions or beliefs of others (e.g., Cialdini & Goldstein, 2004; Nolan, Schultz, Cialdini, Goldstein, & Griskevicius, 2008). Descriptive norms, or norms about what is perceived as what most people do (Cialdini, Kallgren, & Reno, 1991), can be created even without direct observation (Nolan et al., 2008) and may increase a specific behavior (e.g., conserving water in hotels by reusing towels; Cialdini et al., 1991; Cialdini et al., 2006; Nolan et al., 2008). In a creative study involving systematic versus heuristic processing and normative social influence, individuals who were motivated to examine poll data (e.g., people engaging in systematic processing) were more likely to take into account the number of people being polled, whereas those using heuristics were influenced by consensus and not poll numbers in trying to judge the truth (Darke et al., 1998). In other words, people acting on heuristic thinking will take the majority opinion as evidence for reality and are less likely to take into account how large the group being sampled really is. Similarly, even if participants are told that repeated messages come from a single source, the repetition may cause them to infer that a familiar opinion is the one that is widely held (Weaver, Garcia, Schwarz, & Miller, 2007). The power of repetition noted previously is likely to be persuasive not only because the message becomes easy to recall, but because the social media user believes others think it is true.

The social context of what others believe may do more than simply reinforce a single attitude or behavior; it can also make it more extreme. Group polarization, which describes how groups shift opinions in a previously preferred direction to be more radical, has been studied for decades within social psychology (e.g., Isenberg, 1986; Myers & Lamm, 1976). Group polarization in general seems to be caused by a combination of effective persuasion and social comparison (Myers & Lamm, 1976). Social comparison effects may be stronger when the comparison group shares the same social identity and is relevant to the issue at hand (Wood, 2000). Group polarization may be even stronger in anonymous online settings than in settings where individuals are face-to-face (e.g., Sia, Tan, & Wei, 2002). Specifically, when an individual observes others arguing a similar perspective to his or her own, he or she views the perspective as normal, even when it may actually be radical compared to other groups. On the one hand, this social psychological phenomenon can occur and may be a driver of polarization within echo chambers, as well (e.g., Flaxman, Goel, & Rao, 2016). On the other

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