Essay On Social Influence

People affect each other in many different ways. Prior studies have shown how friends can influence one’s own behavior. The presence of a friend spurs some consumers to engage in impression management that in turn drives their spending decisions (Kurt, Inman, & Argo, 2011). Studies have demonstrated how the purses carried and the cars driven by others affect an individual’s own purchases in those categories (Berger & Fitzsimons, 2008). People may be influenced by close others such as friends or family members (Bikhchandani, Hirshleifer, & Welch, 1992), or by distant others such as celebrities or online reviewers (Zhang, 2010).
To date, little research has studied how different levels of social influence differentially impact individual’s purchase decisions (for exceptions, see Argo, Dahl, & Manchanda (2005); Childers & Rao (1992)). In other words, how much an individual is influenced by social others may depend on his relationship to those social others. In this study, we posit that two different dimensions of social influence: social source strength (importance) and size differentially impact purchase decisions of individuals.
The theoretical framework we use is Social Impact Theory (Latané, 1981), which posits that the amount of social impact experienced by a target individual is a function of strength, immediacy and number of sources present. Using online gaming as our context, we investigate the impact of social size and importance on gamers’ virtual good purchases. We argue that different layers of interaction between players: friends and teams may impact players’ purchase behavior in the game differently. Virtual good purchases may also differ in type; players make purchases to satisfy their functional needs, but also their ...

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...age. Some products may also have meanings related to sociocultural events and traditions (Smith & Colgate, 2007). Gamers may purchase virtual goods to enhance their self-image or express their social identity. We name purchases that satisfy symbolic needs as self-image hedonic purchases.
We expect that an increase in social size, which results in a greater number of people to impress, and an increase in tendency for people to engage in impression management (Argo et al., 2005), will translate into larger self-image hedonic purchases. Additionally, we expect that social strength, which allows for different levels of social interaction between individuals will have a stronger impact on performance utilitarian purchases.
H4: Social size has a stronger impact on self-image hedonic purchases, but social strength has a stronger impact on performance utilitarian purchases.