Good morning everybody. Today we are both recreating a famous and very influential psychology experiment and hopefully answering the age old question of how long a piece of string is. In 1951 Solomon Asch conducted an experiment to determine whether an individual would conform to a group's decision even if the individual knew it to be incorrect. The test subjects were asked to identify which of two lines printed on a card was the longest. Unbeknownst to them a number of actors were also hired who occasionally chose the incorrect answer deliberately in order to influence them. Over 12 trials it was found that on average almost a third of participants conformed to the incorrect answer while 25% stuck to their guns and never conformed.
Here Katie has been prepped to give the incorrect answer. Harry initially picked the correct answer, albeit with a large degree of confusion. With some light coercion he was encouraged to pick the correct answer. Although we only have a very small sample of test subjects for our experiment, we will be doing a follow up maths lesson in statistics so that we can manipulate and extrapolate the data to give the (in)correct answers we want.
No comments:
Post a Comment