Suchergebnisse

While the phrase 'consumer decision-making' has been discussed at length, little systematic attention has been given to the handling of risk, one of the most distinctive features of decision-making. In the case of an MD making a choice of prescription drugs, he is usually confronted with a plethora of information, ambivalence toward commercial material, & preference for professional over business sources. He is under heavy pressure to sort & evaluate the data available to him. Is there any discernible pattern to his evaluation? Does he consistently trust one company over another & consequently prescribe its products? Does the pattern change as the drug remains on the market for a number of months? Res conducted with 600 MD's at the Amer Med Assn convention in San Francisco in 1958 & at a southeastern regional Med convention in the same yr indicates that there is a marked relationship between company preference & preference for a given drug for either a mild or severe case of a disease. Preference has an influence on the probability that a drug will be tried out, but this influence decreases markedly after the drug has been on the market for a while. However company preference concontinues to have an effect on drug preference among those MD's who have tried the drug. The concept of 'personal influence' is considered a special instance of another concept, 'source effect,' & it is suggested that these 2 concepts are both associated with contrasting processes labeled 'compliance' & `risk reduction.' In principle either `compliance' or 'risk reduction' could be effected by a person or by an impersonal source. In practice however `compliance' is more likely to be associated with a personal source. Taking this as a point of departure, it is possible to build an indirect case that there are 2 separable psychol'al processes at work in the MD's preference for drugs from a given company. Data suggest that the element of 'risk reduction' (ie, company preference) plays a more important role in the instance of risky drugs than 'compliance' (preference for detailment). Previous studies have stressed the role of professional Med sources in the risky decision of a MD trying a new drug. New data introduced here do not contradict these findings; however they do indicate strongly that MD's also assign an important role to the trust they put in individual firms & their representatives. J. L. Saybolt.

Data collected by interview & Q from Soviet refugees in 1950-51 by the Harvard Project on the Soviet Soc System support 3 main propositions about sources of &trends in alienation: '(1) Difficult conditions of day-to-day living probably produce hostility toward the Soviet order, but this type of hostility is seldom sufficient to produce alienation of sufficient intensity to cause a person to flee the system. (2) An accumulation of ideological opposition to the regime coupled with unsatisfactory life conditions probably is an effective force in alienation of the older, pre-Revolutionary generation; but for succeeding generations alienation depends more on some specific, personal conflict with the system which involves either rejection by the system or loss of faith in its power & influence. (3) Alienation from the Soviet system does not by any means involve rejection of all of its institutional features. As a matter of fact, as time passes, succeeding generations come to take its institutional features more or less for granted & blame the failures & faults of the system on the men who run it.' K. Geiger. Adapted from the source document.

To test the hypo that an individual's memory of experiences or information to which he has been exposed is influenced by his conception of what will interest or please the audience to which he is to present his impressions, the following experiment was devised: 4 groups of S's were read a statement containing arguments for & against raising teachers' salaries. 2 groups had been told that they were to speak on the subject before a taxpayers' org presumably hostile to such increases; the other 2 groups had been told that they were to speak before a teachers' org presumed to be favorable. Of each pair of groups one was to speak in favor of raising teachers' salaries & one against such action. Thus there were 2 groups which expected to speak to a hostile audience & 2 to a friendly audience. These 4 groups were tested twice regarding their memory of the points included in the statement, once immediately after hearing it & the 2nd time 2 weeks later. Whereas there were no signif diff's in the performance of the 4 groups on the 1st occasion, the 2nd test showed a marked tendency in all the groups to remember a much larger number of the arguments pleasing to the group they expected to address. IPSA.

From 2,700 questionnaires and 300 interviews, it was found that despite official attempts to inhibit world-of-mouth communication, an unofficial, oral communications network co-exists with the official Soviet communications system and is an important information source for all Soviet strata. It supplements the official system for the better educated and substitutes for the official system for the Lc. Though a large part of the content of word-of-mouth network is hostile to the regime, participation in it cannot be interpreted as an index of disaffection. There is a tendency for less anti-Soviet persons in the Uc to participate more actively in this medium. For the Lc members and particularly peasants, there is a tendency of participation to be related with anti-Soviet sentiment. (AA).