Page 124 - The Social Animal

106 The Social Animal

Let us take a closer look at the other side of the issue. How can
we help people to resist attempts to influence them? An elaborate
method for inducing such resistance has been developed by William
McGuire and his associates. This method has been appropriately
dubbed the inoculation effect. We have already seen that a two-
sided (refutational) presentation is more effective for convincing
most audiences than a one-sided presentation. Expanding on this
phenomenon, McGuire suggested that, if people receive prior expo-
sure to a brief communication that they are then able to refute, they
tend to be “immunized” against a subsequent full-blown presenta-
tion of the same argument, in much the same way that a small
amount of an attenuated virus immunizes people against a full-
blown attack by that virus. In an experiment by McGuire and Dim-
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itri Papageorgis, a group of people stated their opinions; these
opinions were then subjected to a mild attack—and the attack was
refuted. These people were subsequently subjected to a powerful ar-
gument against their initial opinions. Members of this group
showed a much smaller tendency to change their opinions than did
the members of a control group whose opinions had not been pre-
viously subjected to the mild attack. In effect, they had been inocu-
lated against opinion change and made relatively immune.Thus, not
only is it often more effective as a propaganda technique to use a
two-sided refutational presentation, but if it is used skillfully, such a
presentation tends to increase the audience’s resistance to subse-
quent counterpropaganda.
In an interesting field experiment, Alfred McAlister and his col-
leagues inoculated 7th-grade students against existing peer pressure
70
to smoke cigarettes. For example, the students were shown advertise-
ments (popular at the time) implying that truly liberated women are
smokers—“You’ve come a long way, baby!” They were then inocu-
lated by being taught that a woman couldn’t possibly be liberated if
she were hooked on nicotine. Similarly, because many teenagers
begin smoking, in part, because it seems “cool” or “tough” (like the
Marlboro man), peer pressure took the form of being called “chicken”
if one didn’t smoke. Accordingly, McAlister set up a situation to
counteract that process; the 7th-graders role-played a situation in
which they practiced countering that argument by saying something
like, “I’d be a real chicken if I smoked just to impress you.” This in-
oculation against peer pressure proved to be very effective. By the