Social Inference

Social Influence on memory of Sydney Olympic 2000

Abstract

Our decision-making might change as a consequence of interacting with a single individual or a group of people. We tend to have same opinion with others when we are in a group. An experiment about the effect of social influence was conducted. 563 participants were asked to recall how many medals Australia got in Sydney Olympics 2000. Participants were given ЎҐLowЎ¦ (50%), ЎҐAccurateЎ¦ or ЎҐHighЎ¦ (150%) examples. Result shows that participants tend to be influenced by examples given to them. Participants who were given ЎҐLowЎ¦ examples had lower answers than those given ЎҐAccurateЎ¦ examples while participants given ЎҐHighЎ¦ examples had higher answers than those given ЎҐAccurateЎ¦ examples.

In our daily life, can we ignore to everyone and only do the things that you thought? Absoulty not. There are so many things in our life are affected by the presence of others. For example, after having a Biology multiple choices questions, all your friends said the answer of the first question is B where your answer is C, are u still sure your answer is correct? Social psychologists call these kinds of human behavior as Social Inference. Our attitudes, belief, decisions and actions will be affected by the power of social inference. Conformity is one kind of social inference which to adjust oneЎ¦s behavior or thinking to coincide with a group standard.

Chartand and Bargh demonstrated the effect of conformity when they had students work in a room alongside someone- a confederate working for the experimenter- who rubbed his or her face and, on another occasion, alongside a confederate who shook his or her foot. In this experiment, participants tended to rub their own face when with the face-rubbing person and shake their own foot with the foot-shaking person.

Also, Solomon Asch devised a simple test in 1955. Participants were taken to a room where five people were already seated. The experimenter gave the participant a standard line and other three lines- one is the same as the standard line and , two of them are shorter than the standard line. Participants were asked which line identical to the standard line and they were arranged to be the last one to answer. One third of participants answered wrongly when the first five people give the wrong answer.

In this experiment, participants were randomly divided into three groups. They were asked to fill in a questionnaire about how many medals Australia got in Sydney Olympics 2000. The ЎҐLowЎ¦ group were given examples of 50% of actual figure, ЎҐAccurateЎ¦ group were given accurate example while ЎҐHighЎ¦ group were given examples of 150% of actual figure.

This study investigated whether people are influenced by the views of others when other people have different opinion with them. It was predicted that the mean of the ЎҐLowЎ¦ group will be significantly lower than the ЎҐAccurateЎ¦ group while the mean of ЎҐHighЎ¦ group will be significantly higher than the ЎҐAccurateЎ¦ group.

Method

Participants

563 participants with 385 females and 178 males who study in Psychology 102 in the University of the Western Australia participated in the current research. Their mean age is 19.4 with a standard deviation of 5.1and the range of the participants is from 16 to 63.

Apparatus

Students are required to complete a set of question about how many gold, silver and bronze medals Australia got in the Sydney Olympic 2000. The answers were recorded in the computer. Then the data was analyzed by the SPSS.

Procedure

Every member in the Psychology 102 tutorial class had to complete the question. The first ten answers are the examples which were divided into three groups: 1.Above average. 2.At the average. 3.Below average. The previous answers were shown on the screen, the current students are able to see the answers from previous students. The process was repeated in each tutorial class. When analyzing the data, a bar graph using 95% confidence interval was been constructed in order to check if the population means were significantly different from one another.

Result

Descriptive statistics summarizing the mean, lower and Upper Boundary of High, Medium and Low group are shown in Table 1.

Table 1

Mean, Lower and Upper boundary in High, Medium and Low group

Mean number of medals guessed Lower Upper

Low 42.80 40.08 45.52