Means and methods of psychological influence of information on a person

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The effect of influence on a person depends on what mechanisms of influence were used: persuasion, suggestion or infection.

The most ancient mechanism of action is infection, it represents the transfer of a certain emotional and mental mood from one person to another, based on an appeal to the emotional and unconscious sphere of a person (infection with panic, irritation, laughter).

SuggestionIt is also based on an appeal to the unconscious, to the emotions of a person, but already by verbal, verbal means, and the inspiring one must be in a rational state, confident and authoritative. Suggestion is based mainly on the authority of the source of information: if the one who suggests is not authoritative, then the suggestion is doomed to failure. Suggestion is verbal, i.e. you can only inspire through words, but this verbal message has an abbreviated character and an enhanced expressive moment. The role of the intonation of the voice is very important here (90% of the effectiveness depends on intonation, which expresses the persuasiveness, authority, and significance of words).

Suggestibility- the degree of susceptibility to suggestion, the ability to uncritically perceive the incoming information, is different for different people. Suggestibility is higher in persons with a weak nervous system, as well as in persons with sharp fluctuations in attention. People with poorly balanced attitudes are more suggestible (children are suggestible), people with a predominance of the first signaling system are more suggestible.

Suggestions are aimed at reducing a person's criticality when receiving information and using emotional transference. So, the transfer method assumes that when transmitting a message, a new fact is associated with well-known facts, phenomena, people to whom a person has an emotionally positive attitude, in order for this emotional state to be transferred to new information (transfer of a negative attitude is also possible, in this case incoming information is rejected). Methods of testimony (quoting a famous person, scientist, - thinker) and “appeal to all” (“most people believe that …”) reduce criticality and increase a person's compliance with the information received.

Belief:

Persuasion appeals to logic, the human mind, presupposes a sufficiently high level of development of logical thinking. It is sometimes impossible to logically influence people who are underdeveloped. The content and form of beliefs must correspond to the level of personality development, his thinking.

The persuasion process begins with the perception and assessment of the source of information:

1) the listener compares the information received with the information available to him and as a result, an idea is created about how the source presents information, where he gets it from, if it seems to a person that the source is not truthful, hides the facts, makes mistakes, then the trust in him drops sharply;

2) a general idea of the authority of the persuader is created, but if the source makes logical mistakes, no official status and authority will help him;

3) the attitudes of the source and the listener are compared: if the distance between them is very large, then the belief may be ineffective. In this case, the best persuasion strategy is: first, the persuader communicates elements of similarity with the views of the persuaded, as a result, a better understanding is established and a prerequisite for persuasion is created.

Another strategy can be applied, when at first a large difference between attitudes is reported, but then the persuader must confidently and convincingly defeat alien views (which is not easy - remember the presence of levels of selection, selection of information). Thus, persuasion is a method of influence based on logical methods, which are mixed with socio-psychological pressures of various kinds (the influence of the authority of the source of information, group influence). Persuasion is more effective when the group is convinced rather than the individual.

Belief is based on logical methods of evidence, with the help of which the truth of any thought is substantiated through the medium of other thoughts.

Any proof consists of three parts: thesis, arguments, and demonstration.

A thesis is a thought, the truth of which is required to be proved, the thesis must be clear, precise, unequivocally defined and substantiated by facts.

An argument is a thought, the truth of which has already been proven, and therefore it can be cited to substantiate the truth or falsity of the thesis.

Demonstration - logical reasoning, a set of logical rules used in the proof. According to the method of conducting the proof, there are direct and indirect, inductive and deductive.

Manipulation techniques in the persuasion process:

- substitution of the thesis during the proof;

- the use of arguments to prove the thesis that do not prove it or are partially true under certain conditions, and they are considered true under any circumstances; or the use of knowingly false arguments;

- refutation of other people's arguments is considered as proof of the falsity of someone else's thesis and the correctness of one's own statement - antithesis, although logically this is incorrect: the fallacy of an argument does not mean the fallacy of the thesis.

Imitation

An important socio-psychological phenomenon is imitation - the reproduction of the activities, actions, qualities of another person whom you want to be like. Conditions of imitation:

1. the presence of a positive emotional attitude, admiration or respect for the object of imitation;
2. less experience of a person in comparison with the object of imitation in some respect;
3. clarity, expressiveness, attractiveness of the sample;
4. availability of the sample, at least in some qualities;
5. the conscious focus of the desires and will of a person on the object of imitation (I want to be the same).

The psychological impact of information on a person suggests that there is a change in the mechanisms of regulation of human behavior and activity. As means of influence are used:

1. verbal information, a word - but it should be borne in mind that the meaning and meaning of a word can be different for different people and have a different effect (the level of self-esteem, breadth of experience, intellectual abilities, character traits and personality types affect);
2. non-verbal information (speech intonation, facial expressions, gestures, postures acquire a symbolic character and affect mood, behavior, and the degree of trust);
3. involving a person in a specially organized activity, because within the framework of any activity, a person occupies a certain status and thereby fixes a certain type of behavior (a change in status in interaction leads to a change in behavior, as well as real experiences associated with the implementation of a certain activity can change a person, his state and behavior);
4. regulation of the degree and level of satisfaction of the need (if a person recognizes the right for another person or group to regulate his level of satisfaction of his needs, then changes can occur; if he does not recognize, there will be no impact as such).

The purpose of the impact is:

1. introduce new information into the system of views, attitudes of a person;
2. change the structural relations in the system of attitudes, that is, introduce such information that reveals objective connections between objects, changes or establishes new connections between attitudes, views of a person;
3. change the attitude of a person, that is, make a shift in motives, a shift in the listener's value system.

Socio-psychological installations there is a state of psychological readiness, formed on the basis of experience and influencing a person's reactions to those objects and situations with which he is associated and which are socially significant. There are four installation functions:

1. The function of adaptation is associated with the need to ensure the most favorable position of a person in the social environment, and therefore a person acquires positive attitudes towards useful, positive, favorable stimuli, situations, and negative attitudes towards sources of unpleasant negative stimuli.
2. The ego-protective function of the attitude is associated with the need to maintain the internal stability of the personality, as a result of which a person acquires a negative attitude towards those persons, actions that can serve as a source of danger to the integrity of the personality. If a significant person evaluates us negatively, then this can lead to a decrease in self-esteem, so we tend to develop a negative attitude towards this person. At the same time, the source of a negative attitude may not be the qualities of a person in themselves, but his attitude towards us.
3. The value-expressive function is associated with the needs for personal stability and lies in the fact that positive attitudes, as a rule, are developed in relation to representatives of our personality type (if we assess our personality type rather positively). If a person considers himself a strong, independent person, he will have a positive attitude towards the same people and rather “cool” or even negative towards the opposite.
4. The function of organizing the worldview: attitudes are developed in relation to certain knowledge about the world. All this knowledge forms a system, that is, a system of attitudes is a set of emotionally colored elements of knowledge about the world, about people. But a person can come across such facts and information that contradict established attitudes. The function of such attitudes is to distrust or reject such "dangerous facts"; negative emotional attitudes, distrust, and skepticism are generated towards such "dangerous" information. For this reason, new scientific theories, innovations initially meet with resistance, misunderstanding, mistrust.

Since the installations are interconnected and form a system, they cannot change quickly. In this system, there are installations that are in the center with a large number of connections - these are central focal installations. There are installations that are on the periphery and have few interconnections, so they lend themselves to easier and faster change. As focal attitudes are attitudes to knowledge, which are associated with the worldview of the individual, with his moral credo. The main central attitude is the attitude to one's own "I", around which the entire system of attitudes is built.

Emotional Impact

Research has shown that a more reliable and faster method of changing attitudes is change in emotional meaning, attitude to a particular problem … The logical method of influence for changes in attitude does not always work and not for everyone, since a person is inclined to avoid information that can prove to him that his behavior is wrong.

So, in the experience with smokers, they were asked to read and evaluate in points the reliability of a scientific article on the dangers of smoking. The more a person smokes, the less reliably he evaluates the article, the less the possibility of using logical influence to change his attitude towards smoking. The amount of information received also plays a role. On the basis of numerous experiments, a relationship was revealed between the probability of a change in the setting and the amount of information about the setting: a small amount of information does not lead to a change in the setting, but as the information grows, the probability of a change increases, albeit up to a certain limit, after which the probability of change drops sharply, i.e. a very large amount of information, on the contrary, can cause rejection, mistrust, misunderstanding. The likelihood of a change in a setting also depends on its balance. Balanced systems of attitudes and opinions of a person are characterized by psychological compatibility, therefore, they are more difficult to influence than unbalanced systems, which themselves are prone to rupture.

A person, as a rule, seeks to avoid information that can cause cognitive dissonance - a discrepancy between attitudes or a discrepancy between attitudes and real human behavior.

If a person's opinions are close to the opinion of the source, then after his speech they are even closer to the position of the source, i.e. there is an assimilation, a unification of opinions.

The closer the audience's attitudes are to the source's opinion, the more this opinion is assessed by the audience as objective and impartial. People who are in extreme positions are less likely to change their attitudes than people with moderate views. A person has a system of selection (selection) of information at a number of levels:

1. at the level of attention (attention is directed to what is of interest, corresponds to the views of a person);
2. selection at the level of perception (for example, even perception, understanding of humorous pictures depends on a person's attitudes);
3. selection at the level of memory (what is remembered that coincides is acceptable to the interests and views of a person).

What methods of exposure are used?

1. Methods of influencing the sources of activity are aimed at forming new needs or changing the incentive force of existing motives of behavior. To form new needs in a person, the following methods and means are used: he is involved in a new activity, using the person's desire to interact or correlate, associate himself with a certain person, or by involving the whole group in this new activity and using the motive of following disciplinary norms (“I must, like everyone else in the group, do this and that”), either using the child’s desire to join adult life or the person’s desire to increase prestige. At the same time, involving a person in a new for him, still indifferent activity, it is useful to ensure that the person's efforts to perform it are minimized. If the new activity is too burdensome for a person, then the person loses desire and interest in this activity.
2. In order to change a person's behavior, it is necessary to change his desires, motives (he already wants something that he didn’t want before, or has ceased to want, strive for something that previously attracted him), that is, make changes in the system of the hierarchy of motives. One of the techniques that allows you to do this is regression, i.e., the unification of the motivational sphere, the actualization of the motives of the lower sphere (safety, survival, food motive, etc.) policy in order to “knock down” the activity of many strata of society, creating rather difficult conditions for them to feed and survive).
3. To change a person's behavior, it is required to change his views, opinions, attitudes: create new attitudes, or change the relevance of existing attitudes, or destroy them. If attitudes are destroyed, activity disintegrates.

Conditions that contribute to this:

• uncertainty factor - the higher the level of subjective uncertainty, the higher the anxiety, and then the purposefulness of the activity disappears;
• uncertainty in assessing personal prospects, in assessing one's role and place in life, uncertainty in the significance of the effort expended in study, in work (if we want to make the activity meaningless, we reduce the significance of the effort);
• uncertainty of incoming information (its inconsistency; it is not clear which of them can be trusted);
• uncertainty of moral and social norms - all this causes a person's tension, from which he tries to defend himself, trying to rethink the situation, searching for new goals, or going into regressive forms of response (indifference, apathy, depression, aggression, etc.).

Viktor Frankl (world famous psychiatrist, psychotherapist, philosopher, creator of the so-called Third Vienna School of Psychotherapy) wrote: "The most difficult kind of uncertainty is the uncertainty of the end of uncertainty."

The method of creating uncertain situations allows you to introduce a person into a state of "destroyed attitudes", "loss of oneself", and if you then show a person the way out of this uncertainty, he will be ready to perceive this attitude and react in the required way, especially if suggestive maneuvers are made: an appeal to in the opinion of the majority, the publication of the results of public opinion in combination with the involvement in the organized activities.

In order to form an attitude towards the required attitude or assessment of a particular event, the method of associative or emotional transfer is used: to include this object in the same context with something that already has an assessment, or to cause a moral assessment, or a certain emotion about this context (for example, in Western cartoons at one time dangerous and bad aliens were portrayed with Soviet symbols, hence the transfer "Everything Soviet - dangerous, bad").

In order to strengthen, actualize the required attitude, but capable of causing an emotional or moral protest of a person, the technique of “combining stereotypical phrases with what they want to implement” is often used, since stereotypical phrases reduce the attention, emotional attitude of a person at some point, sufficient for triggering the required setting (this technique is used in military instructions, where they write “Launch a missile at object B” (and not in city B), since the stereotypical word “object” reduces a person's emotional attitude and enhances his readiness to carry out the required order, the required setting).

To change the emotional attitude and state of a person to current events, the method of “recollecting a bitter past” is effective - if a person intensively recalls past troubles, “how bad it was before …”, having seen a past life in a black light, an involuntary decrease in disharmony occurs, human dissatisfaction with the present day and "pink illusions" are created for the future.

To discharge the negative emotional state of people in the required direction and with the required effect, the “canalization of mood” method has been used since ancient times, when, against the background of increased anxiety and frustration of people's needs, an outpouring of the anger of the crowd on people who are only indirectly or almost not involved in the emergence of difficulties is provoked.

If all three factors (and motivation, desires of people, and attitudes, opinions, and emotional states of people) are taken into account, then the influence of information will be most effective both at the level of an individual and at the level of a group of persons.