Key Takeaways
- Some studies have found that women are more responsive than men to particular forms of social influence, especially when their decisions are visible to others.
- The differences are generally modest and depend on the circumstances. They do not establish that women are universally easier to persuade or manipulate.
- Confidence, social relationships, and the visibility of decisions can influence whether someone follows another person’s judgment.
- Research reviews have identified a modest association between female gender and impulse buying, but impulse purchases are not necessarily evidence of conformity or poor judgment.
- A large voter-turnout study found little to no gender difference in responses to social-pressure messages.
Introduction
Research suggests that social pressure, recommendations, and promotional offers can influence purchasing decisions, with some gender differences depending on the circumstances.
Are women more easily influenced than men by social pressure, advertising, and other people’s opinions?
Research suggests that the answer depends on the situation.
Some studies have found that women are more likely to conform to group judgments, follow recommendations from online friends, or respond to certain shopping promotions. Other research has found little or no meaningful gender difference.
The distinction matters because social influence takes several forms. Agreeing with a group, changing an answer after receiving information, and making an impulsive purchase are not the same behavior.
This article examines eight published research papers to explain where gender differences have been observed, what might account for them, and why the evidence does not support broad assumptions about women’s or men’s independence.
What Does It Mean to Be Influenced?
Psychologists distinguish between two important forms of social influence.
Normative social influence occurs when someone adjusts their behavior to gain approval, avoid rejection, or fit in with a group. A person might publicly agree with an opinion they privately question.
Informational social influence occurs when someone relies on another person’s judgment because they believe that person has useful or more accurate information.
For example, a shopper who trusts a knowledgeable friend’s product recommendation may be responding to informational influence. Someone who buys a product mainly because everyone in their social circle owns it may be responding to social expectations.
Impulse buying involves different processes, including emotional reactions, convenience, and promotional incentives.
These distinctions are important. Changing one’s mind can reflect good judgment when the new information is reliable. Similarly, an unplanned purchase is not automatically wasteful.
Researchers therefore cannot use a single behavior to determine whether one gender is generally more susceptible to influence.
A Major Review Found Small Gender Differences in Conformity
One of the best-known investigations of gender differences in social influence was published by psychologists Alice Eagly and Linda Carli in 1981.
Their meta-analysis of 148 studies (Eagly & Carli, 1981) examined differences between men and women in persuadability and conformity.
The researchers found that women were, on average, more persuadable and more conforming in group-pressure situations where the person applying influence could observe their responses.
This visibility matters because people may respond differently when they know their decisions can be judged by others.
The researchers also found evidence of greater female conformity when responses were not directly observed. However, that result was more vulnerable to publication bias, meaning unpublished studies with different findings could have changed the overall estimate.
Importantly, the average gender differences were small.
The review also identified a striking methodological pattern: studies authored by men tended to report larger differences indicating greater female influenceability, while studies authored by women found no overall gender difference.
That observation does not establish deliberate researcher bias. It does, however, raise questions about how research methods and investigators’ expectations may affect results.
Because the review covered research conducted before 1981, its findings also reflect the social expectations and experimental practices of earlier decades.
The evidence supports a limited conclusion: women showed somewhat greater conformity in certain experimental settings, particularly when their responses were visible to the person applying pressure.
It does not establish that women are inherently less independent or more gullible than men.
Confidence May Help Explain Why People Change Their Answers
Confidence in a particular task can influence how much weight someone gives to another person’s judgment.
Cross and colleagues examined this possibility in an experiment involving 168 participants (Cross et al., 2017).
Participants completed either a mental-rotation task, which required mentally manipulating shapes, or a letter-transformation task.
After answering, they rated their confidence, viewed other people’s responses, and had an opportunity to revise their answers.
In the mental-rotation task, women reported lower confidence than men. Statistical analysis identified an indirect relationship between sex and answer-changing behavior through confidence.
The same pattern did not appear in the letter-transformation task.
This difference indicates that confidence may help explain conformity in some situations without representing a general characteristic of women or men.
Someone who feels uncertain about a task may give greater weight to another person’s response. Someone who feels confident may be less inclined to reconsider.
However, the experiment did not establish that women generally lack confidence or automatically accept other people’s opinions.
It also did not show that changing an answer was necessarily a mistake. Whether revision improves performance depends partly on the accuracy of the information received.
A Modern Group-Pressure Experiment Found Weaker Evidence of Gender Differences
In 2023, researchers Axel Franzen and Sebastian Mader revisited the classic Asch conformity experiment, which demonstrated how people sometimes agree with an incorrect group judgment.
Their study, published in PLOS ONE (Franzen & Mader, 2023), involved 210 participants recruited for a modern replication and extension of the experiment.
In the standard line-judgment condition, participants gave incorrect answers on approximately 33% of relevant trials.
When monetary incentives rewarded accurate answers, the error rate declined to approximately 25%.
The researchers also reported a conformity rate of 38% in an experiment involving political statements.
These results show that group pressure can affect judgments even when accuracy matters.
Did Women Conform More Than Men?
Women tended to give more conforming answers in the line-judgment task.
However, the gender difference reached only the 10% statistical significance level rather than the conventional 5% threshold.
That provides relatively weak evidence of a gender difference.
The researchers also examined intelligence, self-esteem, personality traits, and the need for social approval.
Most of these characteristics were not convincingly associated with conformity. Openness was an exception among the personality traits examined.
The study therefore provides stronger evidence that group pressure affects human judgment than that women are consistently more susceptible to it.
Its student-based sample also limits how confidently the findings can be generalized to the wider population.
Online Friends’ Recommendations Had Different Effects on Women and Men
Social influence can also shape consumer behavior.
Jia and colleagues investigated how relationships on social-commerce platforms affected people’s decisions.
Their study, published in Information Systems Journal (Jia et al., 2024), combined large-scale platform records with two controlled experiments.
The researchers initially collected 226,938 valid consumer records from an Asian social-commerce platform involving personal-care products.
Because women substantially outnumbered men in the original dataset, the researchers created a balanced sample of 13,066 consumers, including 6,533 women and 6,533 men.
They also examined the larger dataset to assess the consistency of their findings.
Why Friends Mattered More Than Followed Accounts
The researchers distinguished between two types of online relationships:
- Friends: Accounts connected reciprocally, where users followed one another.
- Followees: Accounts a consumer followed without receiving a reciprocal connection.
In the platform data, women’s decisions were more strongly associated with friends’ previous ratings and purchasing behavior than men’s decisions were.
The gender difference was less evident when the information came from nonreciprocal followees.
The platform’s design provided a possible explanation.
Consumers’ decisions were visible to their friends but not directly accessible to their followees. That distinction allowed the researchers to investigate whether social approval, rather than information alone, contributed to conformity.
The two controlled experiments provided additional evidence for the proposed mechanism. By changing whether decisions were public or private and manipulating the salience of social needs, the researchers showed that these conditions affected the tendency to follow others’ choices.
The findings support the importance of normative social influence in the circumstances studied.
However, the observational platform data alone cannot establish causation, and the experiments do not demonstrate that the same effects occur across all shopping platforms or product categories.
The platform records were also collected in 2012, despite the study’s 2024 publication date.
The results therefore offer evidence about a particular social-commerce environment, not proof that women are more susceptible to every online recommendation or advertisement.
Women Showed a Modest Association With Impulse Buying
Impulse buying is another area where researchers have investigated gender differences.
An impulse purchase is generally an unplanned purchase made in response to an immediate desire or opportunity.
Such purchases may involve emotions, shopping motives, product availability, or promotional offers.
They do not necessarily involve pressure from other people.
A Review of More Than 75,000 Consumers
Iyer and colleagues conducted a meta-analysis of 231 samples involving 75,434 consumers (Iyer et al., 2020).
The review drew on 186 research articles and examined how impulse buying relates to personality traits, shopping motives, available resources, emotions, self-control, and marketing stimuli.
The researchers found an association between gender and impulse buying, with women generally showing a greater tendency toward impulsive purchases.
However, demographic characteristics were less important than several psychological and situational factors.
An individual’s tendency toward impulsivity, shopping motives, and marketing-related influences were more informative predictors.
The total sample size also refers to the entire meta-analysis, not specifically to the gender comparison.
A Second Review Found a Small Statistical Association
Santini and colleagues examined 100 published articles concerning factors associated with impulse buying and its consequences.
Their 2019 meta-analysis (Santini et al., 2019) reported a correlation of r = .15 between female gender and impulse buying.
The gender-specific analysis included 11 studies rather than all 100 articles.
A correlation of .15 represents a relatively small statistical association.
It does not mean that women are 15% easier to manipulate, spend 15% more money, or make 15% more unnecessary purchases.
Nor does it mean that gender can reliably predict whether an individual will make an impulsive purchase.
Together, these reviews indicate that women may show somewhat greater impulse-buying tendencies on average. However, gender is only one of several associated factors, and impulse buying is not evidence of susceptibility to social manipulation.
Promotional Gifts Produced Stronger Purchasing Responses Among Women
Marketing researchers have also examined whether men and women respond differently to specific promotional incentives.
Kovacheva and colleagues investigated how receiving a gift with a purchase affected subsequent consumer behavior.
Their study, published in Psychology & Marketing (Kovacheva et al., 2021), included a field experiment involving a U.S. car-rental company and two follow-up experiments.
In the field experiment, researchers compared car-rental customers who received promotional gifts with a group who did not. They examined purchasing behavior before and after the promotion and found that receiving a gift was associated with a stronger increase in subsequent spending among women than among men.
The researchers then examined why the difference might occur.
Their follow-up experiments suggested that women, on average, perceived greater transactional value from receiving a promotional gift.
Transactional value refers to the additional benefit someone perceives from the transaction itself, beyond the gift’s practical or monetary worth.
For example, receiving an unexpected gift might make a customer feel that a company has offered something extra or established a positive relationship.
The experiments indicated that this perceived value was linked to a stronger motivation to reciprocate, which could encourage additional purchases.
Does This Mean Women Are Easier to Manipulate Through Advertising?
Not necessarily.
The findings concern a particular promotional technique: receiving a gift associated with a purchase.
They do not establish that women respond more strongly to every type of advertising or marketing message.
Nor do they show that the resulting purchases were unnecessary, harmful, or irrational.
A customer may genuinely value both the gift and the service.
The study demonstrates that a specific incentive can produce different purchasing responses across consumer groups. It does not establish a general difference in susceptibility to manipulation.
A Large Voting Study Found Little to No Gender Difference
Not every form of social pressure produces greater responsiveness among women.
Weinschenk and colleagues reanalyzed data from a voter-turnout field experiment involving 344,084 people.
Their study, published in Social Influence (Weinschenk et al., 2018), investigated whether social-pressure messages encouraged men and women to vote at different rates.
Some messages emphasized voting as a social expectation, while others made participation more socially visible.
The researchers found that social-pressure messages could increase voter turnout.
However, they found little to no evidence that women and men responded differently to those messages.
This provides an important counterexample to the assumption that women are consistently more responsive to social expectations.
The findings concern actual voting behavior rather than answers given in a laboratory experiment.
Nevertheless, the data came from the 2006 Michigan primary election. The study did not examine political misinformation, changes in political beliefs, or responses to individual candidates.
Its conclusions should therefore remain tied to voter participation.
What Does the Evidence Mean for Trends, Culture, and Advertising?
The eight studies show that gender differences in social influence can appear under particular circumstances.
They do not establish that women are generally more likely to follow cultural trends, adopt popular opinions, or purchase products simply because others recommend them.
Conforming during a laboratory experiment does not necessarily predict whether someone will adopt a fashion trend, change their lifestyle, or accept a political belief.
Those decisions may involve personal values, economic circumstances, cultural expectations, and access to information.
Similarly, evidence that women respond more strongly to a particular promotional gift does not demonstrate that advertising generally works better on women.
Does Advertising Target Women Because They Are Easier to Persuade?
The studies reviewed here cannot establish that explanation.
Advertising strategies depend on factors such as product categories, purchasing patterns, audience interests, demographics, and campaign objectives.
Determining whether women receive more advertising because marketers consider them more persuadable would require separate evidence about advertising exposure and targeting decisions.
The research supports a narrower conclusion: particular promotional techniques may work differently across consumer groups.
Does the Research Show That Women Buy More Useless Products?
No.
None of the eight papers systematically compared men and women on purchases classified as useless or unnecessary.
An impulsive purchase is not automatically a poor purchase, just as a planned purchase is not automatically sensible.
Similarly, following a recommendation does not mean that the recommended product lacks value.
Claims that one gender buys more useless products would require studies directly measuring product usefulness, purchasing decisions, and subsequent outcomes.
How to Recognize Social Influence in Everyday Decisions
Social influence is a normal part of decision-making.
Recommendations from friends, expert advice, customer reviews, and other people’s experiences can help someone make an informed choice.
Problems may arise when pressure to agree or the appeal of a promotion replaces careful consideration.
A few questions can help when evaluating a decision:
- Am I making this choice because I believe it is right, or because I want to avoid disagreement?
- Would I make the same decision if nobody else could see it?
- Does the person making the recommendation have relevant knowledge or experience?
- Am I responding to the product’s usefulness or mainly to an attractive promotional offer?
- Have I considered information that challenges the group’s opinion?
These questions apply to men and women alike.
They are practical prompts for independent evaluation, not a scientifically validated intervention derived from the eight studies.
Important Limitations of the Research
Several limitations prevent broad conclusions about gender and social influence.
Average differences do not describe individuals. Even when a study identifies a statistically significant gender difference, considerable variation exists within each group. Group averages cannot reliably predict how a particular person will behave.
The studies measure different outcomes. Public conformity, answer switching, impulse buying, responses to gifts, and voter turnout are not interchangeable. Their results cannot be combined into a single percentage describing how much more influenceable one gender is.
Statistical significance does not establish practical importance. A statistically significant difference may be small in everyday terms. Conversely, a result that does not reach conventional significance is not proof that no difference exists.
Social and historical context matters. The studies span several decades, countries, and research settings. Older findings may reflect different social expectations, while results from one platform or population may not generalize elsewhere.
The evidence does not establish an innate gender difference. Social expectations, experience, confidence, cultural norms, and other factors may contribute to observed behavior. These studies do not isolate all possible explanations.
Gender categories were limited by the original research designs. Most studies compared participants classified as women and men or female and male. Their findings do not comprehensively address gender identity or the full diversity of individual experiences.
Final Thoughts
Are women more easily influenced than men? The answer depends on the situation and the type of influence being measured.
Some studies have found greater average conformity among women in publicly observable settings, stronger responses to online friends’ decisions, and modest differences in impulse buying or promotional-gift responses.
Other research, including a large voter-turnout experiment, has found little to no meaningful gender difference.
The evidence does not support the stereotype that women are inherently more gullible, less independent, or easier to manipulate.
Instead, it indicates that confidence, social relationships, decision visibility, and the nature of an incentive can influence how people respond.
Understanding those circumstances offers a more useful explanation of human behavior than making broad assumptions about gender.
Funding and Disclosures
Franzen and Mader (2023) reported receiving no specific funding and declared no competing interests.
Funding and conflict-of-interest disclosures for the other publications have not been comprehensively verified for this article. Readers can consult the original studies for available disclosures.
References
Cross, C. P., Brown, G. R., Morgan, T. J. H., & Laland, K. N. (2017). Sex differences in confidence influence patterns of conformity. British Journal of Psychology, 108(4), 655–667. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjop.12232
Eagly, A. H., & Carli, L. L. (1981). Sex of researchers and sex-typed communications as determinants of sex differences in influenceability: A meta-analysis of social influence studies. Psychological Bulletin, 90(1), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.90.1.1
Franzen, A., & Mader, S. (2023). The power of social influence: A replication and extension of the Asch experiment. PLOS ONE, 18(11), Article e0294325. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0294325
Iyer, G. R., Blut, M., Xiao, S. H., & Grewal, D. (2020). Impulse buying: A meta-analytic review. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 48, 384–404. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-019-00670-w
Jia, Y., Liu, L., & Lowry, P. B. (2024). How do consumers make behavioural decisions on social commerce platforms? The interaction effect between behaviour visibility and social needs. Information Systems Journal, 34(5), 1703–1736. https://doi.org/10.1111/isj.12508
Kovacheva, A., Nikolova, H., & Lamberton, C. (2021). Consumers’ response to promotional gifts: The role of gender, transactional value, and reciprocity. Psychology & Marketing, 38(1), 196–211. https://doi.org/10.1002/mar.21434
Santini, F. de O., Ladeira, W. J., Vieira, V. A., Araujo, C. F., & Sampaio, C. H. (2019). Antecedents and consequences of impulse buying: A meta-analytic study. RAUSP Management Journal, 54(2), 178–204. https://doi.org/10.1108/RAUSP-07-2018-0037
Weinschenk, A. C., Panagopoulos, C., Drabot, K., & van der Linden, S. (2018). Gender and social conformity: Do men and women respond differently to social pressure to vote? Social Influence, 13(2), 53–64. https://doi.org/10.1080/15534510.2018.1432500
