Towards differential social psychology:individual differences in responding to an aggressive discussant

When our experiments on group discussions were started almost fifteen years ago we, like most other social psychologists, assumed that in order to explain social behaviour the primary need was to state and test hypotheses on the environmental conditions of that behaviour. Individual differences were looked at as something which personality psychologists should care about and any individual differences that arose in the experiments were simply treated as error variance. Within our general psychological perspective, the central interest was in some antecedent conditions of social influence in controversial discussions.