Читать книгу Social Psychology - Daniel W. Barrett - Страница 28

A second important question has to do with how independent we are from outside influences. How much do other people affect what you do and what you say? Are you relatively independent from others or mostly conformist? What about obedience to authority—would you be able to resist authority when it matters most, like if someone’s well being depended on it? Whereas the free will question probes the effects of internal, nonconscious processes on social thinking, feeling, and behavior, the independence question asks how external pressures—namely, people—around us can affect those same things. It is obvious that humans can sometimes change other humans. Social psychologists investigate when and how those social influences occur (Bocchiaro & Zimbardo, 2010; Cialdini, 2008; Kim & Hommel, 2015; Pratkanis, 2007a). The subject of social influence is integral to the science of social psychology and, in fact, several of the field’s best-known studies deal with this very topic. In one, individuals were asked—actually, told—by an experimenter to continue giving another person severe electric shocks, even after that person had stopped responding and may have been unconscious or worse (more on this in Chapter 6) (Milgram, 1965). If you were in that situation, what would you do—go along and administer more shocks or rebel against the experimenter and refuse to follow his request?