Informational and Normative Social Influence in Buyer Behavior

An experiment was conducted to clarify the nature of the influence active in most prior marketing research on the social influence process. Experi-mental subjects were exposed to evaluations of coffee which were at-tributed to either a similar or dissimilar source. These evaluations were high in uniformity, low in uniformity or of unknown uniformity. Subjects then tasted and evaluated the coffee. The subjects evaluations were made either under a visible (identifiable) condition or an anonymous condition. The data supported a hypothesis of informational social in-fluence. One of the most pervasive determinants of an in-dividuals behavior is the influence of those around him. This social influence has generally been referred to as conformity and looked upon as the relatively simple act of going along with or agreeing with a visible majority (J ahoda, 1959). Much of the work in social influence has followed theoretically from the conformity studies of Asch and his associates (Asch, 1953) and Sherifs (1936) work in social judgment. In a study following from this re-search, Venkatesan (1966) found that naive subjects were influenced in their public evaluation of mens suits by the prior public evaluations of three confeder-ates of the experimenter who were unanimously and confidently in agreement on their evaluations. He con-cluded that group pressure was effective and that in-dividuals tended to conform to the group norm (Venkatesan, 1966, p. 386). A more recent modified replication of this study achieved similar results (Sims, 1971). Evidence for this phenomenon has also been found in sociometrically selected social groups. Stafford (1966) examined the influence of social group mem-bers on brand choice and found that group members tended to conform (in their choice of bread) to the brand selected by the group leader.1