Reading focus
Syllabus: How Do Social Influence and Power Work?
Use the three motives as competing, sometimes overlapping explanations.
Why you’re reading it. Establish the vocabulary for the whole path.
A question to consider. A committee agrees on a forecast. What observation would help distinguish learning from approval-seeking?
Why this reading
Agreeing with others can serve several purposes. This review organizes compliance and conformity around accuracy, affiliation, and maintaining a favorable view of oneself.
Before you read
Compliance responds to a request; conformity aligns a response with others. A mediator is a proposed explanatory pathway. A moderator changes when or how strongly an effect occurs.
Read for
- Compare the three motives, including cases where they overlap.
- Distinguish a demonstrated response from the process proposed to explain it.
- Notice how uncertainty, relationships, and cultural context change the predictions.
Consider afterwards
- Someone adopts colleagues' estimate. What evidence would distinguish learning from seeking approval or preserving a consistent self-image?
Editorial context
This selective historical review emphasizes research from 1997–2002. Its motivational framework is useful without treating every example, particularly claims about nonconscious processes, as a current consensus. The authors themselves recognize that one response can serve several goals.