Social Influences: Conformity, Compliance, And Obedience

In a society where each individual is held up against unrealistic expectations it is undeniable that people often compromise themselves to fit into the social norms of society. Social roles and social norms are the root in which much of social influence takes place. Social influence is the act by which an individual's emotions, attitudes, and behaviors are altered when interacting with another individual or a group who are perceived to be similar or desirable. Social influence dictates many areas of our lives and various greatly from one culture to another.

Social influence has three main components: conformity, compliance, and obedience. Conformity occurs when an individual changes their behavior to be consistent with the social norms.
The foot-in-the-door technique begins with a small request which leads to a larger request. An example of this technique could be a friend asking for a ride home after practice, this could be a small reasonable request. A couple weeks go by and you’ve noticed that you’ve been driving your friend home almost every day after practice. The lowball technique is when a target accepts a "low-cost" offer only to find out later there are additional hidden costs. An example of this technique could be buying a phone on sale and later on finding out you have to pay a cancellation fee, installation fee, and an additional insurance fee. The next technique is the door-in-the-face technique in which the requester makes an offer that it much larger than the target offer in hopes that the final offer will have the appearance of the requester doing the target person a favor. An example of this would be a car sales man selling a car twice the initial price in hopes that if they drop the price the target person would buy it. The fourth compliance technique is that’s-not-all-technique in which an initial request is followed by adding something that makes the offer more attractive. An example of this technique would be going to the store and seeing a “two for the price of one” sign. This technique makes you feel as if something extra is getting thrown in for free but in reality it’s