Deindividuation effects on normative and informational social influence within computer-mediated-communication

Abstract

Research on social influence shows that different patterns take place when this phenomenon happens within computer-mediated-communication (CMC), if compared to face-to-face interaction. Informational social influence can still easily take place also by means of CMC, however normative influence seems to be more affected by the environmental characteristics. Different authors have theorized that deindividuation nullifies the effects of normative influence, but the Social Identity Model of Deindividuation Effects theorizes that users will conform even when deindividuated, but only if social identity is made salient. The two typologies of social influence have never been studied in comparison, therefore in our work, we decided to create an online experiment to observe how the same variables affect them, and in particular how deindividuation works in both cases. The 181 experimental subjects that took part, performed 3 tasks: one aiming to elicit normative influence, and two semantic tasks created to test informational influence. Entropy has been used as a mathematical assessment of information availability. Our results show that normative influence becomes almost ineffective within CMC (1.4% of conformity) when subjects are deindividuated. Informational influence is generally more effective than normative influence within CMC (15–29% of conformity), but similarly to normative influence, it is inhibited by deindividuation.