“No man is an island” -John Donne
Whether you are a person who socializes a lot and goes out of your way to meet people or you are someone who tend to take longer time spans for your own sake, you do and will inevitably come into contact with other people. I doubt that I have to go into too much detail why this is a good thing. We all know the beauty of learning habits and new perspectives from other people in areas where we definitely lacked them. We also know the joy of helping others in a similar way and feeling the warmth while they light up. Social groups and interactions, however, of course also have an influence on you as a person. It is important to keep this influence in mind and to gain the ability to recognize said influence to make sure that we do not harm others without our knowledge and of course do not get harmed ourselves, be it emotionally or knowledge-wise. This post lays the foundation for upcoming posts about social interactions and influences, as this is a big topic.
Let us start with the experiment which explored normative social influence, the experiment which changed the way I looked at how extensive social influences can have an effect. Solomon Asch had the creative idea of sitting a person down, presenting him/her with a graph with one small line, one medium-length line, one long line and then showing another line which matched one of the prior ones, with the instruction to say which one it matches with. Okay, I will admit that this is not very creative, and people were able to differentiate these very different lines from each. The important and creative steps came after having made sure that people were sure to know the right answer to the questions that were presented. Participants were invited into a room with seven other participants. The participants now, again, had to match presented lines to the ones in the graph. One participant answered after the other. The trick, however, was that the other participants were actors. They started the first rounds off with answering the questions correctly, but after a while they suddenly chose an obviously wrong answer e.g. the short line matches the long line. Now you would think that the real participant, while surprised, would still obviously know and say the right answer. The rate of correct answers dropped to 63% and over twelve trials 75% joined in giving the wrong answer at least ones. Participants were interviewed afterwards and said that they knew that it was the wrong answer. They still chose to give the obviously correct one, with the only difference in the situation being the presence of other people with different opinions and behaviors. Remember that this was a situation with a clear-cut answer which was impossible not to know. This opens up the question how much stronger this influence is when there is ambiguity in a situation, where there is no objective truth.
This experiment is often taught in company with Muzafer Sherif’s autokinetic effect experiment and with good reason. Participants were sat in a room where they were exposed to an optical illusion. They were then asked to describe this illusion and afterwards were guided to a room with the other participants (don’t worry this time there are no actors) with the task to describe the optical illusion in the most accurate way. Back and forth ensued and some sort of consensus was found. Before the end of the experiment each participant was asked to describe the illusion yet again, each separated from each other. Result: everyone adopted the description of the group, discarding their previous description, even if it was the opposite. More striking, however, is that the participants were asked to describe it again after a whole year. They still answered in a way which reflected the group norm one year ago. Now if you combine adopting behavior of others and adopting views of subjective sensory experiences as a result of group dynamics, there is a risk of social influences that is important to keep in mind. This post series is dedicated to make sure of that and with it to ensure the joys of enjoying the company of others without worry.
