Social Influence and Diffusion of Innovations in Education

When a new idea, a new behavior or a new technology appears in our social system, each of us should carefully consider its merits and defects, and after a brief period decide to adopt those innovations that will bring us an advantage, and reject those that are useless or harmful. Nevertheless, it is clear that in daily life we usually behave quite differently. First of all, we can almost never know exactly which innovations will actually turn out to be more useful than the technologies and behavioral patterns that we are used to: some of them could turn out to be more disadvantageous, after all. Moreover, even if the innovation’s promoters have produced scientific data which could help to evaluate their proposals, not all of us are adequately qualified to evaluate such information. (Lissoni, 2000). What we can more realistically do is start to look around us, observing what happens to the first adopters in our circle of neighbours, friends, and work colleagues; it is likely that we will try to exchange information with them about the innovation, paying attention to their opinions and impressions. Our final decision will probably follow this intense work of constructing shared knowledge trough social interaction, rather than being based on pure logical rationality. In this chapter we will highlight some points of contact between research on innovation diffusion and processes of social influence, and we will propose that a theoretical model of influence can help to understand the impact of social interactions on innovative behaviors. Then we will illustrate an empirical study carried out in Italian compulsory schools, in which we aimed at examining whether the evaluation of a new didactical tool by its supposed adopters (teachers, in this case) is affected by the interaction between these latter and those who promote the innovation. For instance, we will examine whether this evaluation is affected by the status of the innovators in the school system, that can be equal (i.e., the innovators are teachers as well) but also higher (i.e., the innovators are principals) than the status of the supposed adopters. Namely, according to the social influence model we will refer to, under certain condition this status imbalance should produce a remarkable effect upon the adopters’ response