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Group Influences on the Helpfulness of Accident Witnesses

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Charles Korte
Charles Korte*
Affiliation:
Vassar College
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Extract

Action that occurs in a group or social context has always held a certain fascination for students of human behavior, partly because of our many notions about the powerful forces that groups exert on the individual. Impressions of group forces derive in part from Le Bon's (1895) early account of crowd behavior, which characterized the crowd's power over the individual as control that was essentially hypnotic, resulting in extremities of behavior, from brutal cruelty to altruism. More recent analyses of group influences have been concerned with the means by which groups elicit and maintain individual conformity to goals, values, and standards shared by the group. For example, Kelman's (1961) theoretical analysis of the processes of social influence has been a significant contribution to our understanding of the antecedents and consequences of conformity phenomena.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , August 1970 , pp. 7 - 19
Copyright
Copyright © 1970 The Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

AUTHOR'S NOTE: This study was based on a dissertation submitted to the Department of Social Relations, Harvard University, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the PhD. degree. The investigation was supported by the United States Public Health Service Pre-Doctoral Fellowship (1-F1-MH-40, 132-01) to the author. The author wishes to express his appreciation to Dr. Robert Rosenthal, who served as the dissertation advisor.

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