Social emotions in discussion Groups

Previous research on attitude change through persuasive argumentation has focused on a large number of characteristics of the source, the message, and the receiver (see McGuire, 1969), most of which were either not immediately related to the emotional aspects of the influence process, or were not analyzed in the context of discussion. During the last decade the choice shift phenomenon has almost completely absorbed the research activities in the area of group discussion (see Cartwright, 1971; Pruitt, 1971; Sauer, 1974; Meyers, and Lamm, 1976), with little attention paid to social-emotional factors. A variety of explanations for the rather regularly observed movement of mean group preference away from the indifference point toward one or the other pole of bipolar scales have been proposed, one of which has turned out especially promising. The proportion of pro and con arguments arising in the discussion (Burnstein, 1969; Burnstein et al., 1973; Ebbesen and Bowers, 1974; Bishop and Myers, 1974) seems to determine the choice shift, thus pointing to the importance of informational influence (Deutsch and Gerard, 1955).