Social Influence Online: The Six Principles in Action

Abstract

I have always been an early adopter of technology. I wrote my first webpage in 1994. I had my first email address in 1992. I made my first amazon.com order in 1996. I joined eBay in 1997. I started playing Massively Multi-player Online Role Playing games (MMORPGs) in 1999. I met my husband online in 2000. Unlike the early days of the Internet, I was late to join Facebook in 2009 (owing to privacy concerns) and have thoroughly enjoyed the social interactions with friends and family that live far from my family and me. As I have traversed the virtual landscape known as the Internet, I have often been curious about how people influence others across this virtual space (accessed in these days by a computer, cell phone, iPad, iPod, etc.). Specifically, I wondered if social influence attempts worked the same online as they did in person. Social influence, also called influence, is a change in a person’s attitudes, behavior, or beliefs as a result of external pressure that may be real or imagined (Cialdini, 2009). In this chapter, I review the literature on Social Influence online. It turns out that the answer to my question of online influence is that it depends. Specifically, the effectiveness of an online influence attempt depends on factors such as the gender of the interactants and whether the specific process behind the influence tactic employed is effective more due to internal or interpersonal factors. In general, women are more resistant to online social influence than men, and influence tactics that function owing to factors internal to the person receiving the influence attempt are more successful online. In this chapter, I review Cialdini’s six principles of influence and review the existing literature on their effectiveness in online interactions. I conclude with a case study that describes an attempt to influence a good friend of mine in an online dating context.

Cialdini (2009) argues that all influence attempts fall into one of six categories: scarcity, reciprocity, consistency/commitment, authority, social validation, and friendship/liking. For instance, anything that is limited in quantity or available length of time is scarce.