Page 58 - The Social Animal

40 The Social Animal

In internalization, the important component is credibility—the
credibility of the person who supplies the information. For example,
if you read a statement by a person who is highly credible—that is,
someone who is both expert and trustworthy—you would tend to be
influenced by it because of your desire to be correct. Recall our ear-
lier example of the diplomats at the Freedonian dinner party. Your
acceptance of their expertise made their behavior (belching after the
meal) seem like the right thing to do. Accordingly, my guess is that
this behavior (your tendency to belch after a meal at the home of a
Freedonian dignitary) would become internalized; you would do it,
thereafter, because you believed it to be right.
Recall the experiment on conformity performed by Solomon
Asch, in which social pressure induced many participants to conform
to the erroneous statements of a group. When participants in this
kind of situation are allowed to respond in private, conformity all but
disappears. Clearly, then, internalization or identification is not in-
volved. It seems obvious that participants in these experiments are
complying with the unanimous opinion of the group to avoid the pun-
ishment of ridicule or rejection. When identification or internaliza-
tion are involved, the conforming behavior tends to persist in private.
The trichotomy of compliance, identification, and internaliza-
tion is a useful one. At the same time, like most ways of classifying
the world, it is not perfect; there are some places where the categories
overlap. Specifically, although it is true that compliance and identi-
fication are generally more temporary than internalization, there are
circumstances that can increase their permanence. For example, per-
manence can be increased if an individual makes a firm commitment
to continue to interact with the person or group of people that in-
duced the original act of compliance. Thus, in an experiment by
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Charles Kiesler and his colleagues, when participants believed that
they were going to continue interacting with an unattractive discus-
sion group, they not only complied publicly, but they also seemed to
internalize their conformity—that is, they changed their private
opinions as well as their public behavior. This kind of situation will
be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 5.
Permanence can also result if, while complying, we discover
something about our actions, or about the consequences of our ac-
tions, that makes it worthwhile to continue the behavior even after
the original reason for compliance (the reward or punishment) is no