- Influencing Others
Reflections on alien abduction, recovered memories, hypnosis and social influence.
Around three million Americans say they have been abducted by aliens. The proportion seems not to be so high in other countries. Those people who believe they have been abducted are often able to describe the experience in minute detail, and as a group are quite convinced of the reality of their experience. Others often doubt the stories taking the view that people consciously or unconsciously invent them. The problem is there are so many believers. If they are all wrong, does the huge number of believers mean we all be somehow persuaded to believe such unlikely events? I guess you will realize by now that I do not believe in alien abduction
There are many aspects of the alien-abduction stories that are similar to some of the "recovered memory" stories of childhood sexual abuse. Given the human tendency to unconsciously reconstruct memories under certain circumstances of social pressure, it is extremely difficult to sort out the real cases of traumatic sexual abuse from the false ones. There have recently been a number of court cases in the US and in Australia in which claims of childhood sexual abuse have been rejected by the courts because the stories told have often been quite fantastic, or because they have not been substantiated by other evidence. Research studies show quite clearly that memory is far from a reliable information source and that confidence in the validity of a memory bears no relationship to the truth of the memory. The interesting question is, how are people influenced to construct and believe in false memories?
Dr Herbert Spiegel, a well known American authority in the area of hypnosis, demonstrated the construction of a detailed false memory on American television in the late 1960s. He convinced a man under hypnosis that radio and t.v stations across the country were the focus of a communist takeover plot. He gave only a broad outline of the supposed plot, but when the man was aroused from hypnosis he began describing the plot in extensive detail. He had filled in all the missing information himself. Furthermore he was convinced of the truth of what he was saying. The whole memory of this experience was apparently "erased" with another hypnosis session and an instruction to forget it all.
Some people who are highly hypnotisable can be convinced when hypnotised that they are blind, though later testing may reveal that they were actually taking in visual information even if they did not consciously register that information. Other studies in which people in hypnosis have been convinced that they have undergone a sex change led to such a strength of conviction that subjects continued to believe in the change even after hypnosis, and after they had been told they would be completely normal again.
There are many other studies of human influence processes that have used more naturalistic situations. One study of nurses set up a situation in which they were instructed by phone, by a "doctor" they had never met, to give a particular medication to their patients. Almost all of the nurses complied with the instruction, though two months later, when interviewed they all denied they would ever do such a thing. Shortly after the denial, another unknown "doctor" gave the same sort of instruction and eighty percent of the nurses still complied. Clearly authority is important in getting people to follow instructions.
The significance of authority seems to account for the results of studies by social Psychologist Stanley Milgram. He told his subjects that they were participating in an experiment on punishment and learning, and instructed them to administer electric shocks to a "learner" if he made a mistake in learning a list of words. Two out of three participants continued to give shocks to the learner as long as the experimenter insisted, right up to the highest voltage possible, even though the dial said "extremely dangerous" and even in the face of screams of agony, and then of ominous silence from the learner's room. In fact the "learner" was a confederate, and no real shocks were given, but it seems that many ordinary decent people will be willing to hurt a complete stranger, even close to the point of death, if they are ordered to by someone they consider an authority.
Studies of social conformity show that even with very clear-cut perceptual tasks like judging the length of lines, in which you would think there was nothing to loose by being wrong, people will change their judgements from what they think is right when others disagree.
The classic social conformity studies involved the use of sets of plain cards with lines drawn on them. Participants were shown two cards, and asked to indicate which of three lines on the second card matched the single line on the first that they were shown. It was a very easy task. There were seven other people at the table, and all were required to give their answers out loud. The other people were actually confederates of the experimenter, and sometimes unanimously contradicted the real participants by giving false answers.
About one in three of the real participants went along with the false answers of the majority, changing their opinions in response to the pressure they felt from the group. Most of the time the conformers actually doubted the evidence of their own senses. If we can be led to doubt our own judgements in such simple and clear-cut tasks, how easily can we be influenced by the real masters of the human influence process, the advertising industry.
A critical point to consider is whether people ever really do believe that the false information they are given in these studies, or in real life situations, is true, or if they are just conforming. Going along with the situation to avoid conflict. A current instance of powerful influence processes, the Nigerian web scam suggests that in the face of the clearest evidence to the contrary, lots of people will believe almost anything if the story told is sufficiently fascination.
In the Nigerian scam emails arrive promising huge sums of money if the reader will just help the sender by providing a few dollars to get things started. In any given year hundreds of millions of dollars are sent to Nigeria by people taken in by the scam. The astonishing thing is not simply that people can be taken in like this, after all the draw of easy money can affect us all. What is really intriguing is that many people who have been defrauded keep on sending money even after investigators explain the fraud and ask them to stop. The lure of mythical money leads them to believe the most outrageous lies. We humans are strange creatures.
More readings will be added to my blog from time to time. Have a quick look now to see the first posting on my blog PSYC1PLUS