Normative Social Influence: Definition and Examples

In 1955, Morton Deutsch and Harold Gerard published a paper in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology that gave social psychology a vocabulary it still uses: a person can go along with a group for two different reasons, and the reasons behave differently. Normative social influence is the first reason, the pressure to meet other people’s positive expectations of you and to be accepted by them. Informational social influence is the second, accepting what others say or do as evidence about how things really are.

The definition, stated plainly

Deutsch and Gerard (1955) defined normative influence as influence to conform to the positive expectations of another person. They defined informational influence as influence to accept information obtained from another as evidence about reality.

The practical difference is in what the person believes afterwards. Under normative influence, someone changes their public behaviour to fit what a group expects, and may keep a different private view. This is usually called compliance. Under informational influence, someone treats the group as a source of data, updates their belief, and acts on it. This is private acceptance.

An engineer’s way to hold the distinction: treat each as an input channel. Informational influence is the channel that carries content. It is valid when the other party knows something you do not, and its failure mode is a confident group that is simply wrong. Normative influence is the channel that carries observation. It does not care whether the content is correct, only whether someone with standing in your life will see the outcome. Its failure mode is that it can push behaviour in a direction you would reject if nobody were watching.

What Asch did, and what Deutsch and Gerard changed

Solomon Asch’s line studies, reported from 1951, put one genuine participant in a room with several confederates who had agreed in advance to give a wrong answer on selected trials. The task was to say which of three lines matched a reference line, and the correct answer was obvious when judged alone. In the standard version, participants went along with the wrong majority answer on roughly a third of the critical trials, and about three-quarters yielded at least once.

Asch’s design could show that people yield; it could not say why. It was also a lab judgment about lines, made among strangers, so the percentages say little about how far a close friend’s opinion would move anyone. A participant who said “B” when the answer was clearly “A” might have doubted their own eyes (an informational reason) or might have wanted to avoid being the odd one out (a normative reason).

Deutsch and Gerard modified the procedure to separate those. In their version, participants made line judgements under several conditions, including face-to-face groups where answers were given in view of others and conditions where participants responded anonymously, without the group being able to identify who said what. The reported result was that conformity fell in the anonymous condition but did not disappear. The paper’s cell-level error rates are not reproduced here; the direction of the result, lower when unobserved and still above zero, is what matters for the distinction.

The reading follows from the design. The share of conformity that vanished when answers became anonymous was attributable to the audience, which is normative influence. The share that remained could not be about an audience, because there was none. It was about the participant taking the others’ answers as evidence, which is informational influence.

A later Asch variant points the same way. In it, participants wrote their answers on paper instead of announcing them, and conformity fell sharply, to roughly 12 percent as commonly reported from Asch’s 1956 monograph.

Why an audience that matters changes more than a fact does

Informational influence is mostly weighed by credibility. If a source is reliable, its information is accepted, and if not, it is discounted. A friend who tells you that a sleep schedule works is a data point.

Normative influence is weighed by who is watching and what they can do to your standing. Approval from people who do not matter to you carries little weight, so the pressure grows with how much the audience matters to the person. A stranger seeing you skip a task costs nothing. A friend seeing it, who will remember it, does.

That gap explains why being told a fact and being seen doing something are different interventions. A fact adds to what you know. Being seen adds a consequence that lives in someone else’s head — and it only fires if that someone matters to you. Robert Cialdini and colleagues’ 1990 work on how visible norms changed littering in parking garages is a clean case: people were not given new information about littering, only a visible cue about what the setting expected, which is a descriptive-norm cue.

The channel is not always helpful. Public announcements of goals can backfire, in the sense that being noticed can substitute for doing. That finding comes from a study of announced intentions, not from conformity research, and it is a reminder that approval can be earned by saying as well as by doing. Normative influence responds to what the audience can observe, so what gets rewarded depends on what the audience sees.

Two examples with the channels pulled apart

The following are constructed cases, not recorded events.

Say a new hire asks a teammate which of two deploy scripts is the safe one, and the teammate names one. The new hire uses it. Nobody is watching and no approval is at stake; the answer is evidence. That is informational influence, and it would work the same over a private message.

Now say the same new hire is in a stand-up where every other engineer says a release is ready. The new hire has seen a failing test, and says “ready” anyway. The room’s answers did not change their mind about the test; the room’s expectation changed what they were willing to say. That is normative influence, and the tell is that the behaviour changes while the belief does not. It would probably not have happened in an anonymous poll — which is the Deutsch and Gerard test, run in miniature.