Dépendance informationnelle et styles de comportement dans l'influence sociale

Abstract

1st year Romanian female university students (N=100) were confronted to a bogus scientific study on friendship groups that contradicted their initial belief. In a 2x2 factorial design the style of the message delivered by the epistemic authority was either authoritarian or democratic; the second variable concerned high vs. low acceptance of students' informational dependence on their teachers. There was a significant interaction effect on the main dependent variable, namely the degree to which participants appropriated the information contradicting their initial belief. It was observed that participants who recognize less the notion of informational dependence are not sensitive to source's style. Participants who recognize more dependence express a representation that is far from that suggested by the source when confronted to the democratic source rather than when confronted to the authoritarian source. For them, correlational analyses shed some light on two contrasted dynamics : informational dependence in front of the authoritarian source, and disengagement in front of the democratic source.