SOCIAL PRESSURE AND PERCEPTION

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 471.

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Imagineyourself in the following situation: you sign up for a psy­chology experiment, and on a specified date you and seven others whom you think are also subjects arrive and are seated at a table in a small room. You don't know it at the time, but the others are actually associ­ates of the experimenter, and their behaviour has been carefully scripted.You're the only real subject.

The experimenter arrivesand tells you that the study in which you are about to participateconcerns people's visual judgments.She places two cards before you. The card on the left contains one vertical line. The card on the right displays three lines of different length.

The experimenter asks all of you, one at a time, to choose which of the three lines on the right card matches the length of the line on the left card. The task is repeated several times with different cards. The other "subjects" unanimouslychoose the wrong line. It is clearto you that they are wrong, but they have all given the same answer.

What would you do? Would you go along with the majority opinion, or would you trustyour own eyes?

In 1951, the social psychologist Asch used this experiment to exam­ine how the pressurefrom other people could affectone's perceptions. In total, about one third of the subjects who were placed in this situa­tion agree with the majority.

Some of the subjects indicated after the experiment that they as­sumedthe rest of the people were correct and that their own percep­tions were wrong. Others knew they were correct but didn't want to be different from the rest of the group. Some even insistedthey saw the line lengths as the majority did.

Asch concluded that it is difficult to maintain that you see something when no one else does. Pressure from other people can make you see al­most anything.