psychology

By Dilaan & Francesca

Psychology experiment

Hypothesis & Aim of the research

AIM: Our aim was to find whether or not people will conform when seeing other people answers. HYPOTHESIS: People will conform to other peoples answers when presented with an ambiguous task. SAMPLING METHOD: Random sampling. We used a jar full of small gems and asked them to estimate how much they thought was in the jar, while presenting them with other peoples answers. PROCEDURE: Consent form was used. However, participants were decieved as we presented them with fake estimates.

In group 1 we found that 80% of participants had conformed to other peoples answers and the mean score was 3800 however, there was an outlier as seen in the bar chart. In group 2 100% of the participants had conformed with a mean score of 824. Nominal data

Group 1 condition A

Group 2 condition B

100%

80%

Findings

Overall, we found that participants tend to conform with the opinion of the majority because they belived that it was correct due to the fact that they also want to be correct, this is know as informational social influence. However, there was a slight disparity between group 1's conformity rate compared to group 2's. A strength of our research was that it was controlled but the limitations are that it lacks external validity & mundane realism as it's not an everyday task, we also had a small sample size making it unrepresentative.

Conclusions & Evaluation