Social Influence and Threat in Confrontations Between Competent Peers

摘要

Five studies investigated social influence processes in confrontations between competent peers andshowed a default absence of influence of a competent source on an equally competent target. This defaultlack of influence is attributed to the representation that competent targets give to the influence encounter,in which different answers from competent peers are incompatible, the error of the source thus being thesine qua non condition of targets' correctness. However, an influence appeared when the representationof the task was modified via a decentering procedure (Study 1), even when controlling for alternativeexplanations (Study 2). Study 3 demonstrated that this liberating effect of decentering did not appearwhen the source was incompetent. Study 4 also examined social comparison processes and showed thatindependence of judgments produced the same liberating effect as decentring. Finally, Study 5 showedthat the default lack of influence in confrontations between competent peers is due to the presence of athreat to the self. Indeed, the reduction of threat through a procedure of self-affirmation modified therepresentation of the task and allowed influence to appear.