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Key Words obedience, norms, foot-in-the-door, door-in-the-face, motivation
Abstract 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.
INTRODUCTION
The study of social influence is renowned for its demonstration and explication of dramatic psychological phenomena that often occur in direct response to overt social forces. Some of the most memorable images from the field's history depict participants struggling to comprehend their circumstances and to respond in accordance with their private judgments in the face of external pressures to do otherwise. These images include a middle-aged gentleman nearly brought to hysterics by a stranger in a lab coat, as exhibited in Milgram's (1974) work on obedience to authority. They also include that bespectacled and rather befuddled young man in Asch's (1956) line-judgment conformity experiments, whose perceptions pitted the likelihood of an incorrect consensus against the likelihood of an incorrect eyeglass prescription. In these classic illustrations, the targets of influence were confronted with explicit social forces that were well within conscious awareness. In contrast, Freedman & Eraser's (1966) seminal investigation of the foot-in-the-door technique, an example of compliance gaining without overt pressure, revealed the subtler aspects of social influence. Although all three lines of research have been prominent in stimulating decades of insightful inquiries into the nature of compliance and conformity, scholars in recent years have been inclined to explore topics more in line with the latter approach; that is, researchers have tended to concentrate their efforts on examining social influence processes that are subtle, indirect, and nonconscious.
The social-cognitive movement has also reverberated throughout contemporary influence research, as investigators attempt to uncover the ways in which targets' implicit and explicit goals affect information processing and decision-making in influence...