Understanding the influential people and social structures shaping compliance

IntroductionWe know, since Plato, that personal influence is persuasive.-Katz & Lazarsfeld, 1955, p. xxivIn early studies of social influence (e.g., Katz & Lazarsfeld, 1955; Tarde, 1903) and in reviews of decades of diffusion research (Rogers, 2003), scholars have argued that certain types of influential people embedded in particular social structures are better able to change others' beliefs and behaviors, and ultimately change the community's beliefs and behaviors via diffusion. Campaigns based on these dynamics (referred to as popular opinion-leader campaigns, Kelly, 2004; and seeding campaigns, Kozinets, de Valck, Wojnicki, & Wilner, 2010) promise efficiency: By identifying and persuading influential people to be agents of change, we can accelerate the diffusion of new ideas, the reach of social movements, and the likelihood of compliance to advocacy messages.The success of campaigns attempting to harness these dynamics are mixed (Rogers, 2003; Southwell, 2013). Part of the difficulty in this process comes from the challenge of identifying influential people (Boster, Carpenter, & Kotowski, 2014; Boster, Kotowski, Andrew, & Serota, 2011; Valente, 2010). A second difficulty is that there has been relatively little effort to theorize how social structure influences the likelihood of person-to-person compliance, in which an influential person attempts to persuade a particular target (Smith & Fink, 2010). These two difficulties are critical to address a basic mechanism of diffusion: "In order for diffusion to take place between any two individuals, the transmission of an object of diffusion must be accepted by the person who does not already have it" (Lave & March, 1993, p. 349).Recent efforts to solve these two difficulties have provided promising new insights: Boster and colleagues (2011) have developed measures to identify influential people, and Smith and Fink's (2010; Fink, High, & Smith, 2014) extension of dynamic social impact theory (DSIT; Nowak, Szamrej, & Latane, 1990) employed features of network structure to enhance the understanding of agents' and targets' suasory power as well as targets' reactions to influence attempts. These insights have implications for theory and practice. Theoretically, understanding the attributes of influential people and the network features that predict their success at gaining the compliance of others represents a critical step forward in theory development. Pragmatically, studies often identify people who fit the criteria of influence agents. For example, in Boster et al.'s 2010 study, 1%-5% of their samples were categorized as superdiffusers. Superdiffusers' network position combined with their personal characteristics may enable them to effect compliance, making diffusion campaigns and influence attempts more effective.These new ideas require additional research. Although influential people should be drawn to central network positions (Boster et al., 2011), the scales developed by Boster et al. have never been tested against network measures. In addition, Smith and Fink's (2010) study was limited by their procedures. Participants were asked to imagine being in a particular location in a social network as well as to imagine their response to a hypothetical other also in that same network who was attempting to influence them. However, participants may have had difficultly imagining some interactions, because the network positions of the target, for example, may not be the position that they would choose for themselves.This study extends the work on influential attributes and DSIT by providing an integration of these efforts. It investigates the position that participants identify with and would choose within a network of friends; the group members with whom they would choose to interact; the extent to which DSIT variables explain participants' anticipated compliance with a group member's attempt to persuade them; and the influence of trait connectivity (Boster et al. …