Models of Suggestive Influence and the Disqualification of the Social Crowd

Making social psychology experimental: A conceptual history, 1920-1970

“…They derived their models for social relationships, not from economics or politics, but from certain kinds of individual interaction, imitative in the case of Tarde, and hypnotic in the case of Le Bon and others (Apfelbaum & McGuire, 1986). Traditionally, these had been understood in moral and religious terms.…”

A critical gaze and wistful glance atHandbook histories of social psychology: Did the successive accounts by Gordon Allport and successors historiographically succeed?

“…when there were many unanswered empirical and metaphysical questions being raised about the limits of, and mechanisms underlying, hypnotic and social influence -processes occurring at the interface of the individual and the social (Apfelbaum, 1989). Apfelbaum and McGuire (1986) have contextualized the various links between hypnosis, suggestion, social influence, conformity, irrationality, the unconscious, and crowd psychology, especially for Tarde (1901) and Gustave Le Bon (1895), describing how investigative focus shifted over time with the eventual jettisoning of the "metaphysical" baggage of psychology occurring in exchange for greater scientific legitimacy. Some of these earlier antecedents, and their interlinkages, had in fact been discussed in Allport's (1968a) more extensive history.…”

“…Hypnosis, treated as an early model of social influence, was a topic that cut across the evolving knowledge systems and disciplines and straddled the boundaries of the natural and social sciences, clinical medicine, law, and metaphysics. Jackson (1988) has offered a short exposition, while more detailed contextual and historicist accounts were to be found, for example, in Apfelbaum & McGuire (1986), Collier et al (1991), and Lubek (1981; as noted above, Danziger (1990) also contextually discussed these antecedents in his treatment of the "subject. "…”

Recent Trends in Theoretical Psychology

“…His last theoretical formulation of an 'inter-psychology' involved a broad range of analyses of interpersonal influence processes, communication, public opinion, economic exchange, and so forth, and it is this theory of inter-mental processes which appears extremely 'interactionist' to a presentist eye. Of course, prior to Thrde's interactionist formulation, a number of alternative conceptions of 'social psychology', and earlier 'proto-social psychologies' had appeared on the French scene (Apfelbaum, 1981(Apfelbaum, , 1988Apfelbaum & Lubek, 1983;Apfelbaum & McGuire, 1986;Lubek, 1981;Lubek & Apfelbaum, 1988;van Ginneken, 1989). Each attempted to describe systematically the processes and relations that occur between, or link, the individual to the 'social' or collective.…”