People tend to protect their sense of freedom.
[Egocentric Thought: Egocentric thought refers to the tendency to
perceive one's self as more central to events than it actually is. The
vast majority of humans remember past events as if they were a leading
player, in control and influencing the course of events and the
behavior of others.]
...Another explanation proposed for the self-serving bias* is that we
are motivated to engage in such attributions to protect and maintain
our self-concepts and self-esteem. According to this perspective, if I
have a positive self-view, it is easy for me to see and accept myself
as accomplishing positive things; on the other hand, a threat to this
positive self-view must be defended against -- perhaps through denial
or a good excuse. This is called ego-defensive behavior.
*
http://www.carleton.ca/~rthibode/self.html
How can we be certain that some of this behavior is motivated by a
desire to maintain high self-esteem? Let us look at the conditions
under which we are most likely to engage in ego-defensive
attributions. In a series of experiments, Gifford Weary and her
colleagues found that the likelihood of giving a self-serving
explanation increases when (1) the person is highly involved in the
behavior; (2) the person feels responsible for the outcome of his or
her action; and (3) the person's behavior is publicly observed by
others. Further, people are least likely to offer a self-serving
attribution when they feel that they can't get away with it -- that is,
when the audience makes it clear that an excuse is not appropriate or
that an excuse will set up unreasonable expectations about future
performance. In other words, self-serving explanations occur most when
the self is "on the line" -- when the self is clearly threatened or
when the person sees an opportunity to achieve a positive image.
---------------
To reduce dissonance, people cognitively spread apart the
alternatives. That is, after making their decision, the women in
Brehm's study emphasized the positive attributes of the appliance they
decided to own while deemphasizing its negative attributes; for the
appliance they decided not to own, they emphasized its negative
attributes and deemphasized its positive attributes.
-----------------------------
According to Jack Brehm's theory of reactance, when our sense of
freedom is threatened, we attempt to restore it. For example, I like
to receive birthday presents. But if a borderline student (in danger
of flunking my course) presented me with an expensive birthday present
just as I was about to read term papers, I would feel uncomfortable.
My sense of freedom or autonomy would be challenged. Similarly,
persuasive communications, if blatant or coercive, can be perceived as
intruding upon one's freedom of choice, activating one's defenses to
resist the messages. For example, if an aggressive salesperson tells
me I must buy something, my first reaction is to reassert my
independence by leaving the store.
In an experiment by Lillian Bensley and Rui Wu, college students
watched one of two messages opposed to the drinking of alcoholic
beverages. One was a heavy-handed, dogmatic message stating that there
was no safe amount of alcohol and that all people should abstain all
the time. The second message was a milder one that stressed the
importance of controlling one's drinking. The second message was far
more effective in getting people to reduce their consumption of
alcohol. This was especially true for heavy drinkers--who almost
certainly experienced the most reactance when confronted with the
heavy-handed message.
Reactance can operate in a number of interesting ways. Suppose that,
as I walk down the street, I am gently asked to sign a petition. I
don't know much about the issue, and as it is being explained to me,
another person accosts us and begins to pressure me not to sign.
Reactance theory predicts that, to counteract this pressure and
reassert my freedom of choice, I would be more likely to sign. This
scenario was actually staged by Madeline Heilman, and the results
confirmed her prediction that, under most circumstances, the more
intense the attempts to prevent subjects 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 autonomy
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 counter-arguments on the spot.
In this way, they are able to prevent their opinions from being unduly
influenced and protect their sense of autonomy. But it is possible to
overcome some of this resistance. Leon Festinger and Nathan Maccoby
conducted an experiment in which they attempted to prevent members of
their audience from inventing arguments to refute the message being
presented to them. This was accomplished by simply distracting the
audience somewhat while the communication was being presented. Two
groups of students who belonged to a college fraternity 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. Festinger 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.
The Social Animal - Elliot Aronson - 8th Edition 1999
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0716733129/
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http://allpsych.com/psychology101/defenses.html
