Social Proof can backfire
It is well recognised that we have a tendency to follow actions and behaviours of the majority, especially in ambiguous situations and in situations where we ourselves do not have strong knowledge or opinion. Behaviour practitioners exploit this tendency under the technique called Social Proof. You would have seen umpteen instances of it’s usage like:
“345 people have bought this item.”
“92% liked this.”
“4 out of 5 stars.”
…
…
You can read more about the technique and its usage here. Recently I came across a situation where the technique totally backfired.
In our company, we were being repeatedly asked to complete a training. There had already been more than 2 mailers regarding the same but yet neither I, nor most of my colleagues had started it. It needed a commitment of 2 hours for something not directly related to work and we procrastinated.
One morning, I had made up my mind to complete the training that day, no matter what. But then I received another ‘reminder email’ for the training which said:
Kindly complete the __ training….. Current stats are really far from target. Stats for your group is attached below
Noting most people had not completed the training yet, I put off my plan to complete it that day. So what happened?
When I realised that I was among the majority of people who had not yet started the training, I got validation for my procrastination. On the other hand if the mail simply told ‘many members have already completed it’, without giving any statistics, I would have felt a certain conflict within me to ‘not be the odd man out’, and complete it soon.
Robert B. Cialdini, known for his extensive work on art and science of influence, says in his seminal paper Crafting Normative Messages to Protect the Environment:
It is widely recognized that communications that activate social norms can be effective in producing societally beneficial conduct. Not so well recognized are the circumstances under which normative information can backfire to produce the opposite of what a communicator intends.
Within the statement “Many people are doing this undesirable thing” lurks the powerful and undercutting normative message Many people are doing this.”
So how can we make sure our citations of social norms has the best effect possible? In the words of Cialdini,
Only by aligning descriptive norms (what people typically do) with injunctive norms (what people typically approve or disapprove) can one optimize the power of normative appeals.
(I shall leave it to you to generalise the above quotes to all social contexts.)
In my example it would have been to align descriptive norm(what people are doing) with injunctive norm(desired changes — completing the training).
So next time think carefully to align social proof with change you aspire to bring.
Comments and feedback are welcome.
