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Variation of the susceptibility to information according to sociometric position and focusing of attention
Author(s) -
Alaphilippe Daniel
Publication year - 1981
Publication title -
european journal of social psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.609
H-Index - 111
eISSN - 1099-0992
pISSN - 0046-2772
DOI - 10.1002/ejsp.2420110201
Subject(s) - psychology , social psychology , variance (accounting) , variation (astronomy) , subject (documents) , variable (mathematics) , position (finance) , developmental psychology , statistics , mathematics , mathematical analysis , physics , accounting , finance , library science , astrophysics , computer science , economics , business
Studied the effect of social support and increased self‐attention on the ways of dealing with information of subjects who were suspicious about the influence of the experiment. All 48 subjects were students from psychology classes who had previously been informed of the processes of social influence. The experimental design was based on two variables: on the one hand, the social support variable, ranging from a strong, medium, weak, to one with no reference at all to social support; the focus of selfattention variable, on the other hand, materialized in the videotaping of half of the subjects. Subjects were asked to make estimates on a number of points. During some of the trials, subjects were given a piece of information consisting of answers supposedly made by other subjects which were in fact their own estimates with a constant number added to them. The experiment has shown that as the social support given to videotaped subjects increased, the subject's confidence in his own estimate increased. This result is partly at variance with the objective self‐awareness theory and shows the importance of the subject's artitude towards the experimental situation (‘emprise experimentale’).