Page 123 - The Social Animal

Mass Communication, Propaganda, and Persuasion 105

my freedom of choice, I would be more likely to sign. This scenario
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was actually staged by Madeline Heilman, and the results con-
firmed her prediction that, under most circumstances, the more in-
tense the attempts to prevent participants from signing the petition,
the more likely they were to sign. Of course, as we have seen in this
chapter and the preceding one, people can be and are influenced and
do comply with implicit social pressures, as in the Asch experiment.
But when those pressures are so blatant that they threaten people’s
feeling of freedom, they not only resist them but tend to react in the
opposite direction.
There is still another aspect of this need for freedom and auton-
omy that should be mentioned. All other things being equal, when
faced with information that runs counter to important beliefs, people
have a tendency, whenever feasible, to invent counterarguments on the
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spot. In this way, they are able to prevent their opinions from being
unduly influenced and protect their sense of autonomy. But it is pos-
sible to overcome some of this resistance. Leon Festinger and Nathan
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Maccoby conducted an experiment in which they attempted to pre-
vent members of their audience from inventing arguments to refute
the message being presented to them. This was accomplished by sim-
ply distracting the audience somewhat while the communication was
being presented.Two groups of students who belonged to a college fra-
ternity were required to listen to a tape-recorded argument about the
evils of college fraternities. The argument was erudite, powerful, and,
as you might imagine, widely discrepant from their beliefs. During the
presentation of the communication, one of the groups was distracted.
Specifically, they were shown a highly entertaining silent film. Fes-
tinger and Maccoby reasoned that, because this group was engaged in
two tasks simultaneously—listening to the tape-recorded argument
against fraternities and watching an entertaining film—their minds
would be so occupied they would have little or no opportunity to think
up arguments to refute the tape-recorded message. The members of
the control group, on the other hand, were not distracted by a film;
therefore, they would be better able to devote some of their thoughts
to resisting the communication by thinking up counterarguments.The
results of the experiment confirmed this reasoning. The students who
were distracted by watching the film underwent substantially more
opinion change against fraternities than did those who were not
distracted.