Uncertainty and Social Influence

Melamed, David; Savage, Scott V.; Munn, Chris

doi:10.1177/2378023119866971

Cited by 11 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 51 publications

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“…To increase task orientation across all tasks, we followed past work by incentivizing performance and offering a $50 bonus to the group that performed best (Melamed, Savage, and Munn 2019; Ridgeway et al 1998). An alternative or additional method is to incentivize each trial, paying participants on the basis of their number of trials answered correctly (Melamed and Savage 2016; Melamed, Savage, and Munn 2019). Each method should help increase task orientation, so we recommend using at least one, or both, whenever possible.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Can You Really Study an Army on the Internet? Comparing How Status Tasks Perform in the Laboratory and Online Settings

Manago

Mize

Doan

2021

Sociological Methodology

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Laboratory experiments have a long history within sociology, with their ability to test causality and their utility for directly observing behavior providing key advantages. One influential social psychological field, status characteristics and expectation states theory, has almost exclusively used laboratory experiments to test the theory. Unfortunately, laboratory experiments are resource intensive, requiring a research pool, laboratory space, and considerable amounts of time. For these and other reasons, social scientists are increasingly exploring the possibility of moving experiments from the lab to an online platform. Despite the advantages of the online setting, the transition from the lab is challenging, especially when studying behavior. In this project, we develop methods to translate the traditional status characteristics experimental setting from the laboratory to online. We conducted parallel laboratory and online behavioral experiments using three tasks from the status literature, comparing each task’s ability to differentiate on the basis of status distinctions. The tasks produce equivalent results in the online and laboratory environment; however, not all tasks are equally sensitive to status differences. Finally, we provide more general guidance on how to move vital aspects of laboratory studies, such as debriefing, suspicion checks, and scope condition checks, to the online setting.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Can You Really Study an Army on the Internet? Comparing How Status Tasks Perform in the Laboratory and Online Settings

Manago

Mize

Doan

2021

Sociological Methodology

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“…One mechanism of this influence could be informational. For example, a variant of the Asch experiment finds that people are more likely to observe and follow others under conditions of uncertainty (Deutsch and Gerard 1955), a finding affirmed by more recent studies (Melamed and Savage 2013;Melamed, Savage, and Munn 2019). Similarly, students with relatively little political exposure prior to entering college may actively seek cues regarding "appropriate" political values and behaviors from their peers.…”

Section: Extrainstitutional Influencementioning

confidence: 95%

How College Makes Liberals (or Conservatives)

Rauf

2021

Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World

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The author examines the role of affiliation networks in shaping the political identities of students in college, using panel survey data from a case study of a predominantly liberal institution, tracking students’ political identities and affiliation memberships throughout the course of college. Although there was some self-selection into politically homophilous student organizations and majors, the extent of political sorting was relatively low, which resulted in considerable political heterogeneity in the affiliation networks. During the course of college, students’ political identities shifted in both liberal and conservative directions. Results from hierarchical multinomial logistic regressions suggest that identity transitions were driven by both the political composition of peer networks and influences outside the educational institution, such as family and prior socialization. This research underscores the importance of considering network stratification and individual contexts for understanding heterogeneous influences of seemingly uniform institutional settings.

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“…Sherif (1937) stated that participants conformed to the group because other participants' responses seemed informative of the right solution. This type of social influence in which a person looks to others for the correct answer or the most appropriate behavior has been called informational social influence (Melamed et al, 2019). In contrast to informational influence, the study of normative social influence mainly developed thanks to the pioneering Asch (1951)'s study.…”

Section: Conformity With Human Agentsmentioning

confidence: 99%