Discusión Usabilidad

number of students were invited to bring two friends to take

part in an experiment with them. Each trio were told to sit in

a room and fill out questionnaires. While they were sitting

there, they could hear the experimenter moving around in

the next room. Suddenly there was a crash and they could hear her calling out in pain. T h e same scenario was repeated with just one student sitting in the room. T h e researchers found that there were half as many responses to the cry when people were with their friends than when they were alone.

Darley and Latané were led generally to conclude that when an individual is alone and an emergency occurs, he must act because there is no one else to take responsibility for h i m . If a child dies in a fire when there is only one adult with t h e child in the house, then that adult alone can be blamed

for not saving the child. If, however, there are others present, responsibility doesn't fall clearly to one person and, as a consequence, none may take it. Each reinforces the other's inertia. Not-acting actually becomes the socially

acceptable thing to do.

T h e need to conform in a variety of social situations, even if there are adverse implications for others outside it, is a strong o n e . Even if attitudes or beliefs remain unaltered, actions

don't. But in many cases, where actions are in line with conformity, attitudes may as a result come to change too. More will be said of that in the next two sections.

Commitment

How does a person's behaviour affect not only his attitudes but also the very stuff from which attitudes are formed? In

The Psychology of Commitment, Professor Charles Kiesler

sets himself to find out, by describing his own and others' experiments which seem to provide some conclusive material to work from,

Freedman and Fraser found that if an individual wants someone to do him a big favour, the most successful technique for winning it is to induce him to do a small favour first. In their experiments, housewives were to be asked to place a large eyesore of a sign on their front lawns, urging passers-by to keep California beautiful. But first, half of the chosen housewives were asked to put a small unobtrusive sign in their windows. Those that had agreed to that request

were far more likely to agree to stand the large sign in their garden (even if the two requests were made by, apparently, two totally unconnected people or even if the signs were about different issues) than those housewives who were approached with the large sign just out of the blue- T h e researchers concluded that the carrying out of the small favour led the housewives to see themselves in a new light - as 'doers'. Therefore the larger request was seen more favourably by them because they were already established in an active role. Quite clearly the actions affected attitude.

In his own work, Kiesler discovered the power of what he termed the 'boomerang effect': if a person has committed himself to something and is then attacked for his position, he increases his commitment, even if it was not at all strong in the first place. To test his theory, he asked a group of liberal- minded women to give out leaflets in favour of birth control to children at local schools. T h e next day, half of the leaflet distributor group received a leaflet themselves through the post, only this leaflet virulently attacked the giving of birth control information in schools. Afterwards all the women

who had been involved in the original distribution plus others in the neighbourhood who were equally liberal- minded about contraception received a visit from a person, supposedly from the birth control campaign, asking them if they would be willing to give more active help in any of several ways- T h e women who had given out the leaflets and then had received a communication through the post attacking their position were far more willing to join up with the campaign than those who had simply given out leaflets or who had done nothing at all. Kiesler said, in general conclusion:

' T h e boomerang effect leads one to interesting possibili- ties . . . [and] might be related to the question of how

people become more extreme in their attitudes. A commit- ted subject might become more extreme under attack in an attempt to justify his past behaviour, since the alternative of abandoning his opinion to agree with the counter-

communication is relatively closed. Since the process of self-justification may not be simple, the person might seek out others who are even more extreme as social support for his previous behaviour: perhaps even seeking other beha- viours to perform that would justify his own. If so, one might turn a moderate into an extremist in a simple but non-obvious manner. First, induce him to perform some behaviour consistent with his beliefs and get him commit- ted to it. Next, attack the attitude in question. We suggest that the person may be more amenable to requests for other extreme behaviour, more willing to interact with others holding an extreme opinion on the issue, and end up by becoming more extreme himself. Of course, the effect should depend on a particular combination of degree of commitment and strength of attack. T h a t is, the

degree of commitment should be high enough so that the subject can't really change his position and the attack should be strong enough to arouse the person's defences (but not so strong that he is forced to abandon his p o s i t i o n ) /

It is interesting that Hans Toch, in The Social Psychology

of Social Movements, succinctly makes a very siniilar

observation: 'Most of us underestimate the extent to which "extreme personalities" can be the products of personal commitment.'

Clearly we may have to alter a treasured concept of what commitment is. More usually people tend to see 'commit- ment' as something very personal, emanating from within. Psychological research would show that it can actually be engendered and manoeuvred from without.

In a study of the effect of forewarning on commitment, Kiesler and Kiesler gave a group of students an article to read, on a topic about which the students' opinions were known. Some of the students received a version of the article which had a footnote on page 1, drawing their attention to the fact that the content was designed to change their current opinion. Others had the footnote at the end of the article.

T h e remainder had no footnote on their article at all. Afterwards, all these students, plus some others who had not even read the article, discussed their views on the topic concerned. Those who had been 'forewarned' by reading the footnote before they read the article and therefore knew their views were under attack, were the strongest in holding to their own original opinion. So, says Kiesler, forewarning of attack may strengthen commitment if the commitment is firm enough.

T h i s finding, borne out by many other independent researchers, may perhaps be seen in the case of religious cult converts who are constantly warned of the dangers of being caught by a deprogrammer who will try to overturn their belief, thus strengthening the converts' resolve to hold firm to their faith in the face of any evil.

Kiesler makes two other points worthy of mention here. He found, in an experiment carried out with researchers Zanna and DeSalvo, that if people committed themselves to attend a certain number of sessions of a group and then discovered that their own views were rather at variance with those.of that group, gradually their own views would grow closer to the group norm. T h e reason here being, not that the individual concerned was frightened of seeming out of things but that, because he had committed himself to spending time with the group, he had to justify that decision, (More will be said of this in the next section.) Kiesler actually makes the comparison between this effect and the friendship that often grew up between POWs in Korea and their warders. It was, after all, the warders that the prisoners were 'committed' to relate to for the immediate or even longer term future, whereas other prisoners could disappear tomorrow.

Finally Kiesler comments on the fact that individuals seem to need to believe that their own actions are self- instigated, whatever the circumstances - a deception which may well arise because of an attack on one's freedom. Kiesler reports:

outside forces, then acting as if one's behaviour was really self-derived is one of the few alternatives left open. In my own experience (in a military training camp for recruits) I have found the percentage of recruits displaying hyper- military type behaviour quite large. T h a t is, people behaved in a military fashion even when it was not demanded nor suggested.' [He gives as an example soldiers who regularly marched from their bunks to the bathroom or who saluted other recruits.] 'In behaving the same way in freer settings, one retains the perception of choice or self-responsibility in more prescribed situa- tions.'

In effect, therefore, in rebellion against coerced beha- viour, an individual may be likely to adopt that very behaviour to extremes, to make believe it was his own, chosen by himself. In the Patty Hearst case, to be described

in Chapter 7, one of the main objections to claims that she had been brainwashed into acting with the revolutionary g r o u p that captured her was that she actually stayed true to the group's ideals for sixteen months after the majority of the

'army' had been killed and she herself was living apart from t h e rest. No one suggested that any mental process such as Kiesler has just described was the motivation for her actions — a need to believe, perhaps, that she had gone along with what had happened to her because such a life-style was really

her own choice. T h e complexities of commitment and reactions against induced commitment should not perhaps be too lightly dismissed in such a context.

Resistance against the overt efforts of someone else to change one's opinion may lead to the very opinion change being sought, as Zimbardo shows. T h e idea, for the person attempting the influence, is to get the other to react against what he is being told but to so arrange things that what the person is reacting against is in fact what he really believes. As Zimbardo puts it: 'Reactance can be used in an ingenious way to get the person to disagree with statements that he or she would ordinarily agree with and to agree with statements

that were previously disagreed w i t h / T h e would-be influencer makes statements such as 'You would have to agree t h a t . . . ' or ' T h e r e is surely no question b u t . . . ' and the view he then puts up is the view he is aiming to put down.

So the committee member who wants the club outing to be arranged by train rather than by coach, says, 'Well, you must agree that coaches are a more pleasant way to travel. You can see the countryside.' T h e other committee member, who really prefers coach travel, may be stung to say, 'Oh no, they are not' because he resents being cornered and having it implied that there is no room for opinion on the matter.

Jack Brehm, the author of reactance theory, describes it as follows: 'the perception that a communication is attempting to influence will tend to be seen as a threat to one's freedom to decide for oneself.' Here again, therefore, illusions of auton- omy and self-motivation can lead people to be most prey to

the influence of others.