Social Influence

A social influence process involves behavior by one person that has the effect-or even just the intention-of changing the way another person behaves, feels or thinks about a stimulus (Zimbardo & Leippe, 1991). The stimulus might be political issue, a product, or an activity. Fishbein and Ajzen represented social influence in their theory of reasoned action as subjective norm (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975). In 1991, Ajzen introduced social influence as subjective norm in theory of planned behavior (I Ajzen, 1991). They pointed out that the more favorable the attitude and subjective norm toward a behavior, the stronger will individual’s intention to perform or to do a behavior. In past several years, many prior studies have proven that social influence significantly effects user behavior (Bhattacherjee, 2000; Chang & Cheung, 2001;

Grandon, Alshare, & Kwun, 2005; C. L. Hsu & Lu, 2004; M. H. Hsu & Chiu, 2004b;

Liker & Sindi, 1997; Nysveen, Pedersen, & Thorbjornsen, 2005; J Song & Kim, 2006). Chang and Cheung (2001) found that influence from social social on intention

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to use internet or World Wide Web at work is significant. Bhattacherjee (2000) pointed that subjective norm was an important factor in predicting intention to use electronic brokerage services. He viewed subjective norm as two forms of influence, namely interpersonal influence and external influence. Interpersonal influence refer to influence by family, friends, colleagues, superiors, while external influence referred to influence by mass media, expert opinion (Bhattacherjee, 2000). Hsu and Lu (2003) viewed social influences as two factors: social norm and critical mass. Social norm referred to influence from colleagues, classmates and friends, while critical mass referred to the value of technology to a user increases with the number of its adopters.

In predicting the factors of users’ intention in playing online game, they found that social norm significantly related to intention, while critical mass significantly related to attitude (C. L. Hsu & Lu, 2004). If influence from other people can change our belief as long as behavior, it means we response to the social influence (Rawlings, Barry, Skouteris, & Rawlings, 2006). Therefore, in this study, we believe that social influence affecting users’ intention to use YouTube to share videos stems from three sources: perceived network externalities, interpersonal norm and social norm.

2.4.1 Perceived Network Externalities

In using or adopting particular system, people will consider the number of people using this system. In the literature, the term is also known as network externalities or critical mass (Katz & Shapiro, 1994; Kraut, Rice, Cool, &

Robert, 1998; Markus, 1987). According to Metcalfe’s law, network externalities exist when the value of a product or service increases as the number of consumers of the product increases, not because of the quality of the product to the consumer (Katz & Shapiro, 1985). Many researches using this theory have been conducted to explain the growth of information technology

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adoption (Lee, 2006; J. Song & Wladen, 2007).

There are three sources of network externalities (Katz & Shapiro, 1985).

The first one is that network externalities may be generated from direct physical effect of the number of users on the quality of the product or service. The utility of phone or fax machine will increase as the number of people using phone of fax machine increases. Another source is an indirect effect where the value of a product increases with the number of users because the quality of the product is higher or there are more complementary products available. After a new kind of operating system is released, it will be more software that is compatible with the new operating system. The last source of network externalities arises in situations where increasing number of sales of a durable good produces greater quality and availability of post-purchase services related to the product depend on the experience and size of the service network. The number of service center of a product increase as the number of the consumer increases. Relating to network externalities theory, the number of shared video in video streaming website like YouTube grows as the number of YouTube viewers grows. In other words, the more people watch YouTube, the more videos could be shared by YouTube. Consequently, perceived network externality is included as one of the antecedents of intention to use in our model.

There are some prominent postulates of network externality theory (Rohlfs, 1974): the value to a user from joining the network is an increasing function of the total number of users who join the network, that users perceive this value and that they make their joining decision based on this perceived value. Video streaming website networks are clearly possessed of network externalities.

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2.4.2 Interpersonal Norm

Interpersonal influence happens in the most individualized influence situations, in which the number of people immediately involved is small and there is one-to-one communication between influence agent and target (Zimbardo & Leippe, 1991). For example, how a best friend tries to convince you go to watch movie with him, or how a mother try to get his son to clean his room.

In the theory of planned behavior (I. Ajzen, 1985), decision maker’

subjective norms related to their cohesive referents, such as family, friends and colleagues. According to innovation diffusion theory (E. M. Rogers, 1983), users will tend to increase communication with referent others to interpret the IT adoption. Therefore, the interactions with social network will influence their decision about IT adoption. In the newer version of his book, Rogers explained there are two category of communication channel, namely interpersonal channel and mass communication (E. Rogers, 1995).

Interpersonal norm is a direct and unmediated causal effect of one person on another (Friedkin, 1998) or in the other words, peer to peer influence (Hung, Ku, & Chang, 2003). Friedkin also mentioned that the greater the probability of an interpersonal attachment from one person to another, the greater the probability that one person will have some influence on another person.

Interpersonal norm refers to ‘‘influence by friends, family members, colleagues, superiors, and experienced individuals known to the potential adopter (Bhattacherjee, 2000).

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2.4.3 Social Norm

In the theory of planned behavior framework, a social norm is defined as perceived social pressure that is whether or not perform a behavior (I. Ajzen, 1985). Social norm refers to mass media reports and expert opinions considered by individuals in performing a behavior (Bhattacherjee, 2000). According to Zimbardo and Leippe (1991), Influence takes place in mass media settings.

Massage and images conveyed over television, radio, and printed publications reach millions of people around the world (Zimbardo & Leippe, 1991). By nature, they are highly impersonal; not only are they designed to be meaningful to many individuals, but they are also communicated through a medium. The communicator is neither physically present nor often explicitly identifiable as a single person or entity but yet the influence can be potent.

The mass media undoubtedly serve many social functions (Lazarsfeld &

Merton, 1996). One of them is the status conferral function. In this function, the mass media confer status on public issues, persons, organizations, and social movements. Another function is the enforcement of social norms. Such function catches phrases as the power of the press (and other mass media) or the bright glare of publicity. As for our study, based on those functions stated above, we add social norm as a function of the mass media to influence someone’s behavioral intention.