the obstinate audience.pdf

THE OBSTINATE AUDIENCE:

THE INFLUENCE PROCESS FROM THE POINT OF VIEWOF SOCIAL COMMUNICATIONx

RAYMOND A. BAUER

Graduate School of Business Administration, Harvard University

NOT long ago, Henry Murray (1962), in anaddress entitled, "The Personality andCareer of Satan," gibed at psychologists

for undertaking Satan's task of shattering man'sfaith in his own potentialities:

Man is a computer, an animal, or an infant. His destinyis completely determined by genes, instincts, accidents,early conditioning and reinforcements, cultural and socialforces. Love is a secondary drive based on hunger andoral sensations or a reaction formation to an innate under-lying hate. . . . If we psychologists were all the time,consciously or unconsciously, intending out of malice toreduce the concept of human nature to its lowest commondenominators . . . then we might have to admit that tothis extent the Satanic spirit was alive within us [p. S3].

Isidor Chein (1962), too, sides with the humanistagainst the scientist in psychology.

among psychologists whose careers are devoted to theadvancement of the science, the prevailing image of Manis that of an impotent reactor. . . . He is implicitly viewedas robot . . . .

The opening sentence of Ethical Standards of Psy-chologists is that, "the psychologist is committed to abelief in the dignity and worth of the individual humanbeing." . . .

But what kind of dignity can we attribute to arobot [p. 3]?

The issue is not, however, whether the findingsof social science do and should have an influenceon how we run our lives and think about ourselves,an influence to a certain extent inevitable and, tosome, desirable. The real issue is whether oursocial model of man—the model we use for runningsociety—and our scientific model or models—theones we use for running our subjects—should beidentical. That the general answer should be"No," I learned when working on my doctoralthesis (Bauer, 1952), which was a chronology ofSoviet attempts to keep the social and scientificmodels of man in line with each other, for I be-came soberly aware then of the delicacy and com-

1 Revision of a paper read at Western Psychological As-sociation, Santa Monica, California, April 1963.

plexity of the relationship of the social and thescientific models of man.

I shall here discuss the relationship of these twomodels in the area of social communication. I shallset up two stereotypes. First, the social model ofcommunication: The model held by the generalpublic, and by social scientists when they talkabout advertising, and somebody else's propaganda,is one of the exploitation of man by man. It is amodel of one-way influence: The communicatordoes something to the audience, while to the com-municator is generally attributed considerablelatitude and power to do what he pleases to theaudience. This model is reflected—at its worst—in such popular phrases as "brainwashing," "hiddenpersuasion," and "subliminal advertising."

The second stereotype—the model which oughtto be inferred from the data of research—is ofcommunication as a transactional process in whichtwo parties each expect to give and take from thedeal approximately equitable values. This, al-though it ought to be the scientific model, is farfrom generally accepted as such, a state of affairson which W. Philips Davison (1959) makes thecomment:

the communicator's audience is not a passive recipient—itcannot be regarded as a lump of clay to be molded bythe master propagandist. Rather, the audience is made upof individuals who demand something from the com-munications to which they are exposed, and who selectthose that are likely to be useful to them. In otherwords, they must get something from the manipulator ifhe is to get something from them. A bargain is involved.Sometimes, it is true, the manipulator is able to lead hisaudience into a bad bargain by emphasizing one need atthe expense of another or by representing a change in thesignificant environment as greater than it actually hasbeen. But audiences, too, can drive a hard bargain. Manycommunicators who have been widely disregarded or mis-understood know that to their cost [p. 360].

Davison does not contend that all the exchangesare equitable, but that the inequities may be oneither side. He only implies that neither the

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audience nor the communicator would enter intothis exchange unless each party expected to "gethis money's worth," at least most of the time.After all, Davison is not speaking as a socialphilosopher nor as an apologist for the industry,but as an experienced researcher trying to makesense out of the accumulated evidence.

Whether fortunately or unfortunately, socialcriticism has long been associated with the studyof communication. The latter was largely stimu-lated by the succession of exposes of propagandafollowing World War I, particularly of the muni-tions-makers' lobby and of the extensive propa-ganda of the public utilities. There was alsosocial concern over the new media, the movies andradio, and the increasingly monopolistic control ofnewspapers. Propaganda analysis, which is whatresearch communication was called in those days,was occupied with three inquiries: the structure ofthe media (who owns and controls them, and whataffects what gets into them); content analysis(what was said and printed); and propagandatechniques (which are the devil's devices to in-fluence people). In this period, effects for themost part were not studied: They were taken forgranted. Out of this tradition evolved Laswell's(Smith, Laswell, & Casey, 1946) formulation of theprocess of communication that is the most familiarone to this day: "Who says what, through whatchannels [media] of communication, to whom[with] what . . . results [p. 121]." This ap-parently self-evident formulation has one monu-mental built-in assumption: that the initiative isexclusively with the communicator, the effectsbeing exclusively on the audience.

While the stimulus and the model of researchon communication were developing out of theanalysis of propaganda, survey research, relativelyindependently, was evolving its technology in thecommercial world of market research and audienceand leadership measurement. As is well known,Crossley, Gallup, and Roper each tried their handsat predicting the 1936 presidential election andwhipped the defending champion, the LiteraryDigest. By 1940, Lazarsfeld was ready to try outthe new technology on the old model with a full-scale panel study of the effects of the mass mediaon voting in a national election, having tested hisstrategy in the New Jersey gubernatorial race in1938.

The results of this study, again, are well known.

Virtually nobody in the panel changed his inten-tion, and most of the few who did so attributed itto personal influence (Lazarsfeld, Berelson, &Gaudet, 1948). The mass media had had their bigchance—and struck out. Negative results hadbeen reached before but none which had beendemonstrated by such solid research. A numberof equally dramatic failures to detect effects ofcampaigns carried on in the mass media followed,and by the end of the decade Hyman andSheatsley (1947) were attempting to explain why.No one could take the effects of communicationfor granted.

As a matter of fact a considerable number ofthe sociologists studying communication grew dis-couraged with inquiring into the immediate effectsof the mass media, and went looking for "opinionleaders," "influentials," the "web of influence," andso on. At the same time, a few here and therebegan doing something we now call "functionalstudies." They were curious to know how theaudience was behaving.

In the meantime, at just about the time thatthe students of the effect of communication in anatural setting were beginning to wonder if com-munication ever had effects, experimental studieswere burgeoning under essentially laboratory con-ditions. Experiments had been conducted before,but the tradition of experimenting on the effectsof communication was vastly enhanced by theWar Department's Information and EducationDivision, and after the war by Hovland and hisassociates at Yale (Hovland, Lumsdaine, & Shef-field, 1949). The Yale group's output, and thatof colleagues and students of Kurt Lewin, accountfor a very high proportion of the experimentalwork on the subject in the past 2 decades.

The experimenters generally had no troubleconveying information or changing attitudes. Ofcourse nobody stopped to record very explicitly themain finding of all the experiments: that com-munication, given a reasonably large audience,varies in its impact. It affects some one way, somein the opposite way, and some not at all. Butnevertheless the experimenters got results.

By the end of the 'fifties it was quite clear thatthe two streams of investigation needed reconciling,and Carl Hovland (19S9) did so. More recently,pursuing the same theme, I stated Hovland'smajor point as being that the audience exercisesmuch more initiative outside the laboratory than it

OBSTINATE AUDIENCE 321

does in the experimental situation (Bauer, 1962).The audience selects what it will attend to. Sincepeople generally listen to and read things they areinterested in, these usually are topics on which theyhave a good deal of information and fixed opinions.Hence the very people most likely to attend to amessage are those most difficult to change; thosewho can be converted do not look or listen. Avariety of studies attribute to this circumstancealone: the fact that actual campaigns have oftenproduced no measurable results, while quite markedeffects could be produced in a laboratory.

Two favorite problems of the laboratory ex-perimenters take on quite a different aspect whenconsidered in a natural setting. One is the ques-tion of the order of presentation of arguments. Isit an advantage to have your argument stated first(the so-called law of primacy) or stated last (theso-called law of recency)? In a laboratory theanswer is complex but it may be quite simple in anatural situation: He who presents his argumentfirst may convert the audience and they in turnmay exercise their oft-exercised prerogative of notlistening to the opposing case. Hence to have thefirst word rather than the last could be decisivein the real world, but for a reason which mayseem irrelevant to the relative merits of primacyversus recency.

Of course, another important variable is thecredibility of the source. By creating an impres-sion of the credibility of the stooge or experi-menter in the laboratory, it is often possible toconvert a person to a position far removed fromhis original one. But in real life, the audienceusually does its own evaluation of sources, and ata certain point sometimes arrives at a result quitethe opposite of that reached experimentally. Ifthe audience is confronted with a communicatortrying to convert it to a position opposed to itsown, it is likely to see him as "biased," and thelike, and come away further strengthened in itsown convictions.

It was quite clear from Hovland's piece, andshould have been even earlier, that the character-istic behavior of the audience in its natural habitatis such as to bring about crucial modifications ofthe results seen in the laboratory. In general,these modifications are strongly in the direction ofsuppressing effect.

In a sense, Joseph Klapper's 1960 book, TheEffects of Mass Communication, marks the end

of an era. Twenty years earlier, a social scientistwould have taken effects for granted and speci-fied the devices the propagandist employed toachieve them. But Klapper (1960) makes state-ments like these: "[my position] is in essence ashift away from the tendency to regard masscommunication as a necessary and sufficient causeof audience effects, toward a view of the media asinfluences, working amid other influences, in atotal situation [p. 5]." He sees communicationsas operating through mediating factors—groupmembership, selective exposure, defense mecha-nisms—"such that they typically render mass com-munication a contributory agent, but not the solecause in a process of reinforcing the existing con-ditions. (Regardless of the condition in ques-tion . . . the media are more likely to reinforce[it] than to change) [p. 8]." Change takes place,according to Klapper, in those rare circumstanceswhen mediating forces are inoperative, when theyare occasionally mobilized to facilitate change, orin certain residual situations. He reviews theliterature on the effect of variation in content,mode of presentation, media, and so on, but ratherthan taking effects for granted, he searches forthe exceptional case in which the mass mediachange rather than fortify and entrench.

Klapper recommends what he calls the "phe-nomenalistic" and others have called the functionalapproach. The study of communication hastraditionally (although not exclusively) been con-ducted from the point of view of the effects in-tended by the communicator. From this perspec-tive, the disparity between actual and intendedresults has often been puzzling. The answer, hascome increasingly to be seen in entering thephenomenal world of the audience and studyingthe functions which communication serves. Thefailure in research to this point has been that theaudience has not been given full status in theexchange: The intentions of its members havenot been given the same attention as those ofthe communicator.

Some will argue that these generalizations do nothold true of advertising. They do. But until nowno one has undertaken to match the effects ofcommunication in various areas according to com-parable criteria and against realistic expectation.

Actually much more is expected of the campaignswith which academic psychologists are associatedthan is expected of commercial promotion. For


example, a paper on governmental informationalcampaigns concluded with these words (Seidenfeld,1961): "while people are willing to walk into adrugstore and buy low calorie preparations andcontraceptives, they are not very anxious to takeshots for protection against polio or attend aclinic dealing with sexual hygiene." By theauthor's own figures, 60% of the public had hadone or more polio shots and 25% had had the fullcourse of four. According to his expectations, andprobably ours, these were hardly satisfactoryaccomplishments.

Yet, what about the highly advertised product,low in calories, with which he was comparing polioinnoculations? Presumably he had heard that itwas a smashing commercial success, or had seensome dollar volume figure on gross sales. Actually,it was being bought by 4% of the market—and60% and even 25% are larger figures than 4%.Our unacknowledged expectations must be reckonedwith.

These differences in expectation and criteriaproduce much confusion, usually on the side ofconvincing people that commercial campaigns aremore successful than others. Yet, consistentlysuccessful commercial promotions convert only avery small percentage of people to action. Noone cigarette now commands more than 14% ofthe cigarette market, but an increase of 1% isworth $60,000,000 in sales. This means influencingpossibly .5% of all adults, and 1% of cigarettesmokers. This also means that a successful com-mercial campaign can alienate many more than itwins, and still be highly profitable.

Equally misleading is the frequent reference topercentage increase on some small base. Thisdevice has been a particular favorite of both thepromoters and the critics of motivation research:One party does it to sell its services, the otherpurportedly to warn the public; both exaggeratethe effect. Thus, for example, the boast, "a 300%increase in market share," means that the productincreased; but it may easily be from 1% of themarket to 3%. Or we may have a 500% gain inpreference for "the new package" over the oldone. That there is that much consensus in theesthetic judgment of the American public is amatter of interest, but it tells nothing about themagnitude of consequences on any criterion inwhich we are interested. I have made some com-putations on the famous Kate Smith war-bond

marathon, which elicited $39 million in pledges.Kate Smith moved apparently a maximum of 4%of her audience to pledge to buy bonds; the morerealistic figure may be 2%I In the commercialworld this is a rather small effect as judged bysome expectations, but yet an effect which oftenadds up to millions of dollars.

But commercial promotions often do not paytheir way. The word is currently being circulatedthat a mammoth corporation and a mammothadvertising agency have completed a well-designedexperiment that proves the corporation has ap-parently wasted millions of dollars on promotingits corporate image. Some studies have shown thatan increase in expenditures for advertising has,under controlled experimental conditions, produceda decrease in sales.

The truth is now out: that our social modelof the process of communication is morally asym-metrical ; it is concerned almost exclusively with in-equities to the advantage of the initiators, themanipulators. From the social point of view thismay be all to the good. The answer to the questionwhether our social and scientific models should beidentical is that there is no reason why we shouldbe equally concerned with inequities in eitherdirection; most of us consider it more importantto protect the weak from the powerful, than viceversa. However, no matter how firmly committedto a morally asymmetrical social model, investiga-tors should note that inequities fall in either di-rection and in unknown proportions.

The combination of this asymmetry and thevarying expectations and criteria mentioned earlierfortifies the model of a one-way exploitative processof communication. And it is probably furtherreinforced by the experimental design in which thesubject is seen as reacting to conditions establishedby the experimenter. We forget the cartoon inwhich one rat says to another: "Boy, have I gotthis guy trained! Every time I push this bar hegives me a pellet of food." We all, it seems, be-lieve that we train the rats. And while the mean-ing of "initiative" in an experimental situation maybe semantically complicated, the experimenter isusually seen there as acting and the subjects asreacting. At the very least and to all appearances,the experimental design tends to entrench themodel of influence flowing in one direction.

The tide is, in fact, turning, although as a matterof fact, it is difficult to say whether the final


granting of initiative to the audience, which seemsto be imminent, is a "turn" or a logical extensionof the research work of the past 25 or 30 years.Obviously Davison and Klapper and others, suchas the Rileys, Dexter and White, Charles Wright,and Talcott Parsons, regard their position as thelogical conclusion of what has gone before ratherthan a drastic inversion. So-called "functional"studies are increasing in volume, and appear now tobe a matter of principle. In any event, Dexter andWhite (in press), the editors of the forthcomingreader whose tentative title is People, Society, andMass Communication, are firmly committed to thispoint of view and have organized the book upon it.

Traditionally, the name "functional studies" hasbeen applied to any work concerned with a rangeof consequences wider than or different from thoseintended by the communicator. Two early classics,both done in the 'forties, are studies of listeningto daytime radio serials: one by Herta Herzog(1944), and the other by Warner and Henry(1948). They established that women used theradio serials as models for their behavior in reallife. In the late 'forties, Berelson (1949) studiedhow people reacted to not having newspapersduring a strike, work which Kimball (1959)replicated in the newspaper strike of 1948. Thevariety of functions the newspapers proved toserve is amazing, including the furnishing of rawmaterial for conversation. "The radio is no sub-stitute for the newspaper. I like to make intel-ligent conversation [Kimball, 1959, p. 395]."There was also research on the adult following ofcomics (Bogart, 1955), children's use of TV(Maccoby, 1954), and the reading of Madmagazine (Winick, 1962).

From a cursory glimpse, one concludes thatearly functional studies suffered from a tendencyto focus on the deviant. Or, put another way,functional or motivational analysis (motivationresearch can be regarded as a subdivision of func-tional analysis) was ordinarily evoked only whenthe stereotyped model of economic rational manbroke down. The findings advanced scientificknowledge but did little to improve the image ofman in the eyes of those committed to a. narrowconcept of economic rationality. We may well arguethat the social scientists' model of man is inreality broader, more scientifically based, and evenmore compassionate; but the public may notthink so.

Thus, the early functional studies added toknowledge of the process of communication byincluding effects intended by the audience. Thereis a question, however, as to what they did to thesocial model of the process. Certainly the workof motivation research was written up in such away as to confirm the exploitative model. Butmore recent functional studies focus on ordinaryaspects of communication, and present the audi-ence in a more common, prosaic, and, therefore,more sensible light.

Meanwhile, new trends have been developing inpsychological research on communication. Untilabout a decade ago, the failure of experimentalsubjects to change their opinions was regarded asa residual phenomenon. Little systematic orsympathetic attention was paid to the persistenceof opinion. The considerable volume of recentresearch using what the Maccobys (Maccoby &Maccoby, 1961) call a homeostatic model is domi-nated by theories based on the psychology ofcognition, Heider's balance theory, Festinger's dis-sonance theory, Osgood and Tannenbaum's con-gruity theory, and Newcomb's strain for sym-metry. While the proponents of each theory insiston adequate grounds on their distinctiveness, allagree that man acts so as to restore equilibrium inhis system of belief. In any event, homeostaticstudies do finally accord some initiative to theaudience. Specifically, they reveal individuals asdeliberately seeking out information on personseither to reinforce shaken convictions or con-solidate those recently acquired. Festinger, forexample, is interested in the reduction of dissonancefollowing upon decisions—which means he viewspeople as reacting to their own actions as well asto the actions of others. This influx of new ideasand new research is a valuable and welcome ad-dition to both the theory and practice of socialcommunication.

Restoring cognitive equilibrium is, however,only one of the tasks for which man seeks anduses information. Furthermore, the homeostatictheories, while according initiative to the audience,make it peculiarly defensive. They do little tocounteract the notion of a one-way flow of in-fluence—although it must be conceded that ascientific model is under no moral obligation tocorrect the defects, if any, of the social model.

Much is gained by looking upon the behaviorof the audience as full-blown problem solving.


Such a viewpoint requires the assumption thatpeople have more problems to solve than simplyrelating to other people and reducing their psychictension, among them being the allocation andconservation of resources.

The mass media have long been criticized be-cause they facilitate escape from the responsi-bilities of the real world. But Katz and Foulkes(1962) point out that if man is to cope adequatelywith his environment, he must on occasion retreatto gather strength. Hence, escape per se is not abad thing: It is socially approved to say, "Bequiet! Daddy is sleeping," although not yet ap-proved to say, "Be quiet! Daddy is drinking."They take a generally irresponsibly handled prob-lem of social criticism and convert it into one ofthe allocation and conservation of resources. Itwould take dose calculation to decide whetheran hour spent drinking beer in front of the TV setwould, for a given individual, result in a net in-crease or decrease in his coping effectively withthe environment. Yet, while the data they re-quire are manifestly unattainable, their very wayof posing the problem raises the level of discourse.

The necessity for taking explicit cognizance ofthe audience's intention was forced on us when wewere studying Soviet refugees. We knew thatvirtually every Soviet citizen was regularly exposedto meetings at which were conveyed a certainamount of news, the party line on various issues,and general political agitation and indoctrination.In free discussion our respondents complained end-lessly of the meetings so we knew they were there.But when we asked them, "From what sourcesdid you draw most of your information about whatwas happening?" only 19% specified them, incontrast to 87% citing newspapers, 50% citingradio, and another 50% word of mouth(Inkeles & Bauer, 1959, p. 163). Gradually theobvious dawned on us; our respondents were tellingus where they learned what they wanted to know,not where they learned what the regime wantedthem to know.

A similar perplexity arose with respect to theuse of word-of-mouth sources of information. Itwas the least anti-Soviet of our respondents whoclaimed to make most use of this unofficial fountainof information. Rereading the interviews, andfurther analysis, unraveled the puzzle. It was thepeople most involved in the regime, at least inthe upper social groups, who were using word-of-

mouth sources the better to understand the officialmedia, and the better to do their jobs (Inkeles andBauer, 1959, p. 161)! As a result we had toconduct analysis on two levels, one where we tookinto account the intentions of the regime, theother, the intentions of the citizen. Thus, viewedfrom the vantage point of the regime's intention,the widespread dependence upon word of mouthwas a failure in communication. From the pointof view of the citizen and what he wanted, his ownbehavior made eminent sense.

At the next stage, we benefited from the loose-ness of our methods, the importance of the peoplewe were studying, and from highly imaginativecolleagues from other disciplines. We were study-ing the processes of decision, communication, andthe like, in the business and political community.As we studied "influence" by wandering aroundand getting acquainted with the parties of bothcamps, and kept track of what was going on, thenotion of a one-way flow became preposterous.A Congressman, for example, would snort: "Hell,pressure groups? I have to roust 'em off their fatrears to get them to come up here." It also becameclear that men in influential positions did a greatdeal to determine what sort of communication wasdirected toward them (Bauer, Pool, & Dexter,1963). At this juncture, Ithiel de Sola Pool crys-tallized the proposition that the audience in effectinfluences the communicator by the role it forceson him. This idea became the organizing hy-pothesis behind the Zimmerman and Bauer (1956—this experiment was replicated by Schramm &Danielson) demonstration that individuals processnew information as a function of their perceivedrelationship to future audiences. Specifically, theyare less likely to remember information thatwould conflict with the audience's views than theyare to remember information to which the audiencewould be hospitable.

The final crystallization of my present viewsbegan several years ago when a decision theoristand I together reviewed the studies by motivationresearchers of the marketing of ethical drugs todoctors. Surprisingly, I found the level of motiva-tion discussed in these reports quite trivial, but thereports provided perceptive cognitive maps of thephysician's world and the way he went abouthandling risk. The now well-known studies of theadoption of drugs by Coleman, Menzel, and Katz(1959) contributed data consistent with the fol-


lowing point: Physicians become increasinglyselective in their choice of information as riskincreases either because of the newness of the drugor difficulty in assessing its effects. Thereupon, agroup of Harvard Business School students (in anunpublished manuscript) established by a question-naire survey that as the seriousness of the diseaseincreased, physicians were increasingly likely toprefer professional to commercial sources of in-formation.

Parenthetically with respect to the Coleman,Menzel, and Katz (1959) studies whose data I saidare "consistent with" the notion of risk handling:I am convinced that this way of thinking is whollycompatible to the authors. Yet their presentationis sufficiently dominated by the prevailing view of"social influence" as a matter of personal com-pliance that one cannot be entirely sure justwhere they do stand.

Why doesn't the physician always prefer profes-sional to commercial sources of information? Thephysician is a busy man whose scarcest resourcesare time and energy, two things which commercialsources of information, on the whole, seem to helphim conserve. Even so, he is selective. Let usassume two components in the choice of source ofinformation: social compliance and the reductionof risk. Consider, then, that the doctor may beinfluenced by his liking either for the drug com-pany's salesman who visits his office, or for thecompany itself. We may assume that, of these twocomponents of influence, social compliance will bemore associated with his sentiments toward thesalesman and risk reduction with the company'sreputation.

In a study conducted with the Schering Cor-poration (Bauer, 1961), I found that in the case ofrelatively riskless drugs, the correlation of prefer-ence for drugs with preference for salesman andfor company was about equal. However, withmore hazardous drugs—and with large numbersof subjects—preference for the company carriedtwice the weight of preference for the salesmen:The physicians selected the source closest as-sociated with reduction of risk.

In the latest and fullest development of thispoint of view, Cox (1962) asked approximately300 middle-class housewives to evaluate the rela-tive merits of "two brands" of nylon stockings(Brand N & Brand R) as to over-all merits andas to each of 18 attributes. After each rating the

subject was asked to indicate how confident she wasin making it. The subjects then listened to atape-recorded interview with a supposed salesgirlwho stated that Brand R was better as to 6 at-tributes, whereupon they were asked to judge thestockings again and to evaluate the salesgirl andtheir confidence in rating her. Finally, they com-pleted a questionnaire which included three bat-teries of questions on personality, one of which wasa measure of self-confidence.

The findings of interest here bear upon person-ality and persuasibility. Male subjects low ingeneralized self-confidence are generally the morepersuasible. Females are more persuasible in gen-eral but on the whole this is not correlated withself-confidence or self-esteem.

The reigning hypotheses on the relationship ofself-confidence to persuasibility have been basedeither on the concept of ego defense (Cohen,19S9) or social approval (Janis, 1954), and Coxchose to add perceived selj'-confidence in accom-plishing a task. He was dealing, then, with twomeasures of self-confidence: generalized self-confi-dence, presumably an attribute of "personality";and specific self-confidence, that is, perceivedconfidence in judging stockings.

It has been suggested that the reason that inwomen personality has not been found correlatedwith persuasibility is that the issues used in experi-ments have not been important to them. And im-portance may account for the strong relationshipCox found when he gave them the task of ratingstockings. That he was testing middle-class house-wives may be why the relationship was curvilinear.(That is to say, his subjects may have covereda wider range of self-confidence than might befound in the usual experimental groups.) Womenwith medium scores on the test of self-confidencewere the most likely to alter their rating of thestockings in the direction recommended by thesalesgirl; those scoring either high or low were lesslikely to accept her suggestion. As a matter offact, countersuggestibility apparently crept inamong the women low in self-confidence; those whorated lowest were almost three times as likely asthe others to change in the opposite direction.Since these findings were replicated in threeindependent samples, ranging from 62 to 144 sub-jects, there is little reason to question them forthis type of person and situation. The differenceswere both significant and big.


The curvilinear relationship was not anticipatedand any explanation must, of course, be ad hoc.One might be that, faced with the difficult taskof judging between two identical stockings andthe salesgirl's flat assertion that one was better thanthe other, the women tacitly had to ask themselvestwo questions: Do I need help? Am I secureenough to accept help? Accordingly, the subjectsmost likely to accept the salesgirl's suggestionwould be those with little enough self-confidenceto want help, but still with enough to accept it.As an explanation, this is at least consistent withthe curvilinear data and with the apparent counter-suggestibility of the subjects with little self-con-fidence.

This explanation, however, should not apply toindividuals confident of their ability to perform thetask. And this turned out to be the case. Amongthe subjects confident they could perform thespecific task, generalized self-confidence playedlittle or no role. The usual notions of social com-pliance and ego defense were virtually entirelyoverriden by the subject's confidence in her han-dling of the task—a conclusion which is supported,no matter how the data are combined.

My intention in telling this is to present apromising experiment in regarding the audience asbeing involved in problem solving. As alreadysuggested, theories of social communication arecaught between two contrasting models of humanbehavior. One we may call the "influence" model:One person does something to another. We havepartially escaped from the simplest version of it,and now regard the audience as influenced only inpart, and in the other part solving problems ofego defense or of interpersonal relations. Mean-while, there is the always endemic model ofeconomic rationality which in one or another ofits forms sees man as maximizing some tangiblevalue. This latter, very simple problem-solvingmodel we spontaneously use when we judge be-havior, particularly with respect to whether it isrational or sensible or dignified. Thus ironically,we use the influence model, or the modified in-fluence model, to explain why people do whatthey do, but we use the economist's problem-solvingmodel for evaluating the behavior. There is scarcelya surer way of making people look foolish!

There is no reason why the two models shouldnot be seen as complementary rather than antago-nistic. But the fusion has not taken place to any

conspicuous degree in the mainstream of research,as can be seen most clearly in literature on in-formal communication and personal influence.There are two major traditions from which thisliterature has developed (Rogers, 1962): One,that of the heartland of social communication,stresses social compliance and/or social conformity.The other tradition, that of rural sociology, isconcerned with how farmers acquire knowledgeuseful in their day-to-day problems. While thetwo have in certain respects become intermeshedafter some decades of isolation, overtones of socialcompliance and conformity persist in the social-psychological literature. There is little reference toproblem solving.

The students of one of my colleagues who hadread a standard treatment of the role of referencegroups in buying behavior discussed it entirelywithout reference to the fact that the consumersmight want to eat the food they bought!

The virtue of Cox's data is that they enableus to relate the problem-solving dimensions of be-havior to social relationships and ego defensive.It is interesting that—in this study—the more"psychological" processes come into play only atthe point at which felt self-confidence in accom-plishing the task falls below a critical point. Thus,tendency to accept the suggestions of the allegedsalesgirl in Cox's experiment must be seen as afunction of both ability to deal with the task andpersonality.

The difficulty of the task may either fortify orsuppress the more "social-psychological" processes,depending on the specific circumstances. Thus,study of drug preference shows that as the taskgets easier, the individual can indulge in the luxuryof concurring with someone whom he likes, whereaswhen risk is great he has to concentrate on therisk-reducing potentialities of the source of in-formation.

Thus the full-blown, problem-solving interpreta-tion of the behavior of an audience in no senserules out the problems with which students of com-munication have recently concerned themselves:ego defense and social adjustment. As a matterof fact, such problems seem explorable in a moreprofitable fashion if, simultaneously, attention ispaid to the more overt tasks for which people useinformation. Yet, while there has been a consist-ent drift toward granting the audience more initia-tive, it cannot be said that the general literature


on communication yet accords it a full range ofintentions.

Of course, the audience is not wholly a freeagent: It must select from what is offered. Buteven here, the audience has influence, since it isgenerally offered an array of communications towhich it is believed it will be receptive. The proc-ess of social communication and of the flow ofinfluence in general must be regarded as a transac-tion. "Transactionism," which has had a varietyof meanings in psychology, is used here in thesense of an exchange of values between two ormore parties; each gives in order to get.

The argument for using the transactional modelfor scientific purposes is that it opens the doormore fully to exploring the intention and behaviorof members of the audience and encourages in-quiry into the influence of the audience on thecommunicator by specifically treating the processas a two-way passage. In addition to the influenceof the audience on the communicator, there seemslittle doubt that influence also operates in the"reverse" direction. But the persistence of theone-way model of influence discourages the investi-gation of both directions of relationship. Withamusing adroitness some writers have assimilatedthe original experiment of Zimmerman and Bauerto established concepts such as reference groups,thereby ignoring what we thought was the clearimplication of a two-way flow of influence.

At our present state of knowledge there is muchto be said for the transactional model's pragmaticeffect on research, but at the same time it is themost plausible description of the process of com-munication as we know it. Yet there seems to bea tendency to assume that words such as "trans-action," "reciprocity," and the like imply exactequality in each exchange, measured out preciselyaccording to the value system and judgment ofthe observer. This is nonsense. Obviously thereare inequities, and they will persist, whether weuse our own value systems as observers or if wehave perfect knowledge of the people we observe.

The rough balance of exchange is sufficientlyequitable in the long run to keep most individualsin our society engaged in the transactional rela-tions of communication and influence. But some"alienated" people absent themselves from thenetwork of communication as do, also, many busi-nessmen who have doubts about the money they

spend on advertising. The alienation is by nomeans peculiar to one end of the chain of commu-cation or influence.

This point of view may be taken as a defenseof certain social institutions such as advertisingand the mass media. There is a limited range ofcharges against which impotence may indeed beconsidered a defense. Once more, ironically, boththe communicator and the critic have a vested in-terest in the exploitative model. From the pointof view of the communicator, it is reassuring thathe will receive at least a fair return for his efforts;to the critic, the exploitative model gratifies thesense of moral indignation.

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