Page 50 - The Social Animal

32 The Social Animal

belch when dining alone with the dignitary. However, if you had
belched the first time out of fear of rejection or punishment (as
would have been the case had you dined in the company of the
wrestlers), you would almost certainly not belch when you are the
lone guest. To go back to Sam and the political candidate on tele-
vision, you can now readily understand one of the many reasons
why it would be so difficult for us to predict how Sam would actu-
ally vote in the election. If he had been merely going along with the
group to avoid punishment or to gain acceptance, he would be
likely, in the privacy of the polling booth, to vote in opposition to
the view expressed by his acquaintances. If, on the other hand, Sam
had been using the group as a source of information, he would
almost certainly vote against the candidate that he had initially
preferred.

Social Influence and Emotion To repeat: When reality is un-
clear, other people become a major source of information. The gen-
erality of this phenomenon is nicely illustrated by some research
performed by Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer, who demon-
strated that people conform to others even in assessing something as
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personal and idiosyncratic as the quality of their own emotions. Be-
fore describing this research, it is useful to clarify what is meant by
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emotions. According to William James, an emotion has both a “feel-
ing” component and cognitive content. His two-part conception of
emotions can be likened to the process of playing a song on a juke-
box: First, you need to activate the machine by inserting the coin;
then you select the song you want to hear by pushing the right but-
tons. An emotion also requires both physiological arousal and a label.
Specifically, if we are walking in the forest and bump into a hungry
and ferocious bear, we undergo a physiological change. This change
produces excitement. Physiologically, this is a response of the sym-
pathetic nervous system similar to one that might be produced by
coming across a person with whom we are angry. We interpret this
response as fear (rather than anger, say, or euphoria) only when we
cognitively become aware that we are in the presence of a fear-
producing stimulus (a ferocious bear). But what if we experienced
physiological arousal in the absence of an appropriate stimulus? For
example, what if someone surreptitiously slipped into our drink a
chemical that produced the same physiological response? Would we