The 69 participants in the 1966 Rocky Mountain Workshop in Group Development, sponsored by the Adult Education Council of Metropolitan Denver, served as subjects in the present investigation. The study was designed to determine whether an instrumented feedback procedure based on sociometric ratings would help the members of laboratory training groups increase their sensitivity to others. It was found that subjects in experimental groups who filled out sociometric questionnaires and received feedback on their mutual ratings showed a significantly greater increase in sensitivity during a three-day period than control subjects who were not exposed to the sociometric procedure. Subjects in # i and # 2 control groups who rated one another but who did not receive feedback did not show a significant increase in sensitivity between the beginning and the end of the workshop, regardless of a time control in the administration of the questionnaire.
The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of messages of varying ethos upon opinion change. The results support the hypothesis that messages attributed to a High Ethos Group are more influential than those attributed to a Collection of High Ethos individuals, a High Ethos individual, a Low Ethos Group, and a Collection of Low Ethos individuals.A number of investigators have demonstrated that written communications designed to persuade can have an impact on their readers [6, 71. Researchers have also found that messages attributed to a high ethos individual are generally more persuasive than those attributed to an individual with low credibility [ 11. Studies of the influence process in small groups have revealed that under some circumstances, group interaction can bring about more change than other forms of persuasion [8, 91. However, very little is known about how receivers respond to messages produced by groups or if the persuasiveness of such messages is related to the group's ethos or credibility.The purpose of the present investigation was to study the reactions of subjects to a written communication attributed to high and low ethos groups and to compare the effects of these "group communications" with messages attributed to single individuals or a collection of individuals. Andersen and Clevenger have defined ethos as "the image held of a communicator at a given time by a receiver" [l, p. 591. According to them prestige and credibility are among the most common connotations of Michele Tolela Myers (Ph.D.,
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