Social Engineering - Christopher Hadnagy [137]
The end results were that a certain social incentive, usually involving praise or positive reinforcement from peers or authority figures, created a strong bond between the students and instructors:
The major conclusion of this entire research effort is that the management of social incentives is a particularly difficult art. While social incentives can be identified and scaled with considerable ease, manipulation and management of the same incentives requires considerably greater effort. The scaling data show high attractiveness value for various social incentives. The results of the field experiment show the positive influence of the acquaintanceship and psychological contract exercise on attitudes toward fellow trainees. Both of these findings underline the importance of social factors.
In other words, increasing or decreasing the attractiveness of the social incentive is not too difficult once you know what motivates a person. This phenomenon is particularly evident in groups of teenagers. When they find out what bothers someone, it is often used as a weapon to force compliance. The larger the group that provides the pressure, the greater the chance the target will comply.
This is a powerful statement. I wonder how that research would have gone if the researchers had been able to use the plethora of social media sites that exist today. Peer pressure is a strong influence and everyone wants to fit in and be part of the crowd.
Social incentives work. In 2007 a group of researchers (Oriana Bandiera, Iwan Barankay, and Imran Rasul) wrote a research paper entitled, “Social Incentives: The Causes and Consequences of Social Networks in the Workplace” (www.social-engineer.org/wiki/archives/Manipulation/Manipulation-Social-Incentivespdf.pdf).
The report is an interesting study along the lines of the Air Force study, but set in 2007. Basically the researchers analyzed how those who have “friends” at work handle their jobs when they work in groups with their friends. Their conclusion:
Our findings indicate there are social incentives—the presence of friends affects worker productivity, despite there being no externalities of worker effort onto their co-workers due to the production technology or compensation scheme in place. Due to social incentives, workers conform to a common norm when working together. The level of the norm is such that the presence of friends increases the productivity of workers who are less able than their friends and decreases the productivity of workers who are more able than their friends.
Social incentives are a quantitatively important determinant of a worker’s performance. As workers are paid piece rates based on individual productivity, the strength of social incentives is such that (i) workers who are more able than their friends are willing to forgo 10% of their earnings to conform to the norm; (ii) workers who have at least one friend who is more able than themselves are willing to increase productivity by 10% to meet the norm. Overall, the distribution of worker ability is such that the latter effect dominates so the net effect of social incentives on firm performance is positive.
The presence of friends meant that a person would actually work harder or less hard depending on their normal work level. Peer pressure with the absence of the actual pressure can affect people’s work. The pressure is perceived by what is standard. Why? Maybe if a person could work faster or better, she probably didn’t want to appear to be a know-it-all or brown-noser, as these people can be called. Maybe if he is normally more of a slacker, he didn’t want to appear lazy so he pushed up the pace a little. In either case their work ethic was affected by having friends.
A good point for management is to always put the hardest workers and natural leaders over the group. But there is so much to learn in this research.
This method is how social engineers use “tail-gating.”