What has psychological research told us about resisting social influence?

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Essay: What has psychological research told us about resisting social influence?

Introduction

Social influence can be strong, weak or non-existent and that the factors determining this can be seemingly trivial, unconscious and vary with personality. This is undoubtedly what led to Stainton Rogers’ (1995) assertion that “there are no simple answers or scientific laws to be discovered” in respect of questions of social influences. In this paper, however, I show that despite a plethora of unexpected results the research is pointing to possible new theories of social influence. Human social behaviour may be complex but this is made up of a multiplicity of individual simple factors as in all biology, and must at some level obey scientific laws.

Examples of research into social influences

In 1964 two New York psychologists set out to determine experimentally the basis of an extraordinary killing. Thirty eight neighbours witnessed the chase and multiple stabbing attacks of a young woman over a period of thirty minutes, with not one of them calling the police. The neighbours struggled afterwards to explain their own behaviour, deciding it was the ‘dehumanising effect of city life’. The psychologists were not satisfied with this explanation and set out to investigate it. They set up a variety of staged emergencies such as someone having an epileptic fit alone in a room or smoke seeping from under a door. What they found was that no-one called the police because there were 38 witnesses. If only one person was a witness they rushed to help 85% of the time but if they saw there were four others this dropped to 31% (Darley & Latane 1968).

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Wells & Petty (1980) played a radio broadcast discussing dispassionately an increase in university tuition fees through headphones to students on the pretext they were testing the robustness of the headphones. One third of the students were told to nod their head up and down while listening, one third were to shake their head from side to side and the last third were to keep their head still. Remarkably, when given questionnaires later, the ‘still’ group were unmoved by the editorial and thought tuition should be kept as it was. The side to side group disagreed strongly with the ...

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