William J. McGuire

Some Internal Psychological Factors Influencing Consumer Choice

The directive, information-processing aspects of the personality are described in terms of eight successive steps: exposure, perception, comprehension, agreement, retention, retrieval, decision making, and action. Each of these steps is illustrated by recent psychological research. The dynamic, motivational aspect of human personality is described more briefly in terms of 16 basic human motives that have received attention in recent psychological research.

Some Contemporary Approaches

Publisher Summary This chapter describes various approaches to the problem of inducing resistance to persuasion, and presents a number of variations on each approach. Persuasive messages are known to be more effective if they are presented with their conclusions explicitly drawn, rather than left to be drawn by the recipient. Several ways of inducing resistance to persuasion, and some possibly pretreatments—like enhancing the persons tendency to use perceptual distortion in the defense of his preconceptions—are included in the chapter. Some contemporary approaches to inducing resistance to persuasion include the behavioral commitment approach, anchoring the belief to other cognitions, inducing resistance cognitive states, and prior training in resting persuasive attempts. It is believed that with better education the individual becomes more resistant to persuasion. However, empirical research does not consistently support such a proposition. It is by no means clear that any general-education manipulation would have the effect of increasing resistance to persuasion. Training more specifically tailored to reduce susceptibility to persuasion might be more successful. There is some evidence that the more intelligent are more resistant to conformity pressures from peers, but they also seem to be more susceptible to the mass-media kind of persuasion attempts. Further experiments will have to determine, if inoculation theory will predict the immunizing efficacy of various types of defenses in the case of controversial beliefs as successfully as it has for truisms.

A contextualist theory of knowledge: its implications for innovation and reform in psychological research

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the contextualist epistemology as an appropriate metatheory for psychology. Contextualisms implications for reforming the process and product of psychology are also discussed in the chapter. The two phases of needed process reforms are described in the chapter for creatively generating hypotheses and developing them by the means of empirical confrontation. In the chapter, the psychological product is also discussed by reviewing the various theoretical depictions of the person that have guided and grown out of the research process. These implications are described for the process of developing psychological theory and then as relative to the product—the theories that emerge from the process. The various internal criteria for judging the relative adequacy of competing theories—that are sometimes even mutually contradictory—illustrates a basic descriptive tenet of contextualism. The four types of theories guiding and emerging from the research are (1) categorical theory, (2) process theories, (3) axiomatic theories, and (4) guiding-idea theories. The sixteen partial views of human nature that have served as guiding-idea theories for psychological research are tabulated in the chapter. The content aspect of social psychology or contextualism reveals the need for an ecumenical stance toward theory for recognizing the existence and utility of a wide variety of formulations to generate insights into the contents and determinants of experience and behavior.

EFFECTIVENESS OF FOREWARNING IN DEVELOPING RESISTANCE TO PERSUASION

In a fundamental comparison of the results of experimental and survey studies of attitude change, Carl Hovland pointed out a characteristic difference in the defenses ordinarily applied by the participants in the two kinds of studies. Here is an experimental investigation designed to throw further light on the question. William J. McGuire is Associate Professor of Social Psychology in the new Department of Social Psychology at Columbia University. Most of the work on this study, however, was done while he was a member of the Department of Psychology and on the staff of the Institute of Communication Research at the University of Illinois. Demetrios Papageorgis is completing his graduate work at the University of Illinois.

Content and Process in the Experience of Self

Publisher Summary This chapter focuses on the experience of self by the person at particular reflective moments, on the ways the content and process of the phenomenal sense of self are affected by situational and dispositional variables. Content issues concern when ones myriad aspects are salient (available) in thought and when one asks oneself who one is; process issues concern the persons modes of thinking about this self content. The chapter discusses the content and process, by the nouns and verbs, respectively that occur in free self-descriptions. Some of the ways in which methods differ from the usual reactive approach to study the self is described in the chapter. The present research program employs tedious content analyses of open-ended responses for the rich content and process information they yield, justifying the greater effort. The chapter explains the way the salience of these physical characteristics in spontaneous self-descriptions is affected, not only by their distinctiveness but also by other factors such as gender and age.

Effects of household sex composition on the salience of one's gender in the spontaneous self-concept ☆

Abstract It was hypothesized that being a boy or a girl becomes more salient in a childs self-concept to the extent the other sex numerically predominates in the childs household. This prediction was based upon an information-processing, distinctiveness postulate that a person contemplating a complex stimulus (such as the self) selectively notices and encodes its more distinctive, information-rich aspects. The spontaneous self-concept elicited by nondirective “Tell us about yourself” interviews of 560 school children were scored for spontaneous mention of ones gender. As predicted, boys spontaneously mentioned their maleness more often when they came from households where females were in the majority; girls mentioned their femaleness more often when from households with male majorities; boys mentioned their maleness more often when from father-absent than from father-present homes. Incidental findings are that gender is more salient in the negation self-concept (“Tell us what you are not ”) than in the affirmation self-concept (“Tell us about yourself”) especially for girls and that gender becomes increasingly salient as the child grows older.

The Yin and Yang of Progress in Social Psychology

We describe the current dissatisfactions with the paradigm that has recently guided experimental social psychology—testing of theory-derived hypotheses by means of laboratory manipulational experiments. The emerging variant of doing field experiments does not meet the criticisms. It is argued that an adequate new paradigm will be a more radical departure involving, on the creative side, deriving hypotheses from a systems theory of social and cognitive structures that takes into account multiple and bidirectional causality among social variables. On the critical side, its hypotheses testing will be done in multivariate correlational designs with naturally fluctuating variables. Some steps toward this new paradigm are described in the form of seven koan.

Perspectivism in social psychology : the Yin and Yang of scientific progress

Following William J. McGuires model as a theorist and researcher, this resource brings together psychologists from Europe, Israel and North America offering new and emerging agendas for social cognition, under the common theme of perspectivist methodology and the study of thought systems. Additionally, the book offers a historical approach to the study of stereotyping and intergroup relations and uses language as an indicator of social psychological processes.

A Perspectivist Approach to Theory Construction

A perspectivist approach is taken to the theory-construction process in psychological research. This approach assumes that all hypotheses and theories are true, as all are false, depending on the perspective from which they are viewed, and that the purpose of research is to discover which are the crucial perspectives. Perspectivism assumes also that both the a priori conceptual phase of research and the a posteriori empirical phase have both discovery and testing functions. Topics discussed include how the perspectivist approach can improve methodology training and practice (particularly as regards theory construction); what researchers accept as theoretical explanations; the nature of mediational theories; how theories can be formalized, expressed in multiple modalities and for various scaling cases; and how experimental designs can be enriched by theory-guided mediational and interactional variables.

Salience of Handedness in the Spontaneous Self-Concept:

The distinctiveness postulate regarding selective perception implies that an aspect of a complex stimulus is likely to be noticed in direct proportion to its distinctiveness in the environment in which it is perceived. An implied prediction tested in the present study is that handedness is more salient in the self-concepts of left-handers than of right-handers. The spontaneous self-concept was measured in two different populations by open-ended “Tell us about yourself” questions. In each group, a significantly greater proportion of left- than right-handers mentioned their handedness as part of their self-concepts.