Nice to Know You: Familiarity and Influence in Social Networks

Advertisers on Social Network Sites often use recommendations by others in a user´s networks to endorse products. While these familiar others are hypothesized to be more effective in influencing users than unfamiliar others, there is a catch: familiarity does not necessarily ensure similarity to the familiar person, a potential problem because the combination of familiarity and dissimilarity has been hypothesized to lead to lowered compliance. In an experiment (N = 44), we test people´s compliance to similar and dissimilar familiar others in an online environment: we show that in both cases, familiarity leads to increased compliance. The work highlights the importance of familiarity on influence and suggests that gaining familiarity even in situations of dissimilarity is effective.