Peer Pressure Persuasion

Trust – peer pressure and persuasion.

Table of Contents
Trust – peer pressure and persuasion. 1
Introduction 2
Behaviourism 3
Social Facilitation 4
Conformity 5
Compliance 7
Goal oriented interpersonal communication strategies. 10
Conclusion 11

Introduction
This essay will review social psychological, and interpersonal strategies used as part of communication and what part if any, trust plays in people being influenced and persuaded.
Social psychology is the study of the effect of social groups upon an individual and their behaviour, the impact on the person's thoughts or cognitive processes. These can affect the person's interactions with others, the way they relate and act towards others and the thoughts an individual has about themselves

The formal study of social psychology was only recognised in the late nineteenth century. The earliest known textbooks on the subject were both printed in 1908, one book by McDougal and the other by Ross. In McDougal's book (McDougall, 1908), he proposed that social behaviour stems from innate tendencies. McDougal believed that behaviour was driven by human nature, society's rules and moral judgements. McDougal introduced the idea that that the higher the social evolution of the individual and the more advanced the society, the greater the moral sense. He saw the pinnacle of civilisation being Western and other civilisations as primitive or savage.
Whereas Ross (Ross, 1908) postulated that social groups and other people influenced an individual's social behaviour. This approach became termed as behaviourism. The behaviourists subscribed to the belief that external environment stimuli directly affect an individual's behaviour.
This difference of opinion spurned two distinct streams of social psychology in the early twentieth century in the Western hemisphere. In North America, the behaviourist approach was ascribed to, whereas practitioners of the field dropped McDougal's elitist and some may say, racist, view that that social evolution and moral judgements drive an individual’s

With the rise of the Nazi party in the 1930’s many intellectuals escaped Europe and emigrated to North America including some of the leading European social psychologists at that time. The majority had been trained in “Gestalt” psychology (American Psychological Association, 1991), viewing context as critical to an individual’s perception. The Gestalt approach clashed with the more popular North American behaviourist approach.
Two such advocates of Gestalt at that time were Lewin (Lewin, 1939) and Sherif, who through their experimental approaches grounded in Gestalt, evolved experimental social psychology during the mid-twentieth century.
Sherif experimented with group “norms” and conformity in his autokinesis experiments (Sherif and Brannigan, 1935). In a series of experiments, he asked subjects to estimate the movement of light. These estimates were fed back to the researcher at an individual level. Sherif would manipulate the group's makeup to ensure differing estimates were present in the group. In Sherif’s findings, he proposed that people in a group will tend to conform and make a group agreement and are prepared to drop their individual judgement in favour of group conformity if they perceive the group as having greater subject knowledge. Sherif later went on to further investigate intergroup conformity and conflict in a series