Quetstion 6 - Practice 3

Question 6

Practice 3

Lecture

Listen to a lecture. Fill in the missing information in the notes.

W: We would all like to think that we make decisions by sounds−that we can resist things like advertisements and peer pressure.

But as it turns out, that the power of conformity−that is, the tendency to be influenced by others within a group−is much stronger than we might imagine.

In the 1950s, the American social psychologist, Solomon Asch, showed just how much the pressure to conform can affect our decisions.

He conducted an experiment which showed that not only are most people easily willing to conform to a group, they will also compromise their own knowledge to do so.

Asch’s experiment involved nothing more than three straight black lines drawn on note cards. During the experiment, he asked a room full of students to announce out loud, one by one, their answers to a series of questions about the length of the three lines.

They might be asked which line was longest, which two lines were of the same length, and so on.

In reality, only the very last participant to state his answer was ignorant of what the experiment was about.

The other students in the room had been previously informed to give the same incorrect answers to the questions, so when the last student’s turn came to answer, he had to decide whether to go with the group’s response or to trust what he saw with his own eyes.

Before Asch collected the results of his experiment, he believed that people would stand up against group pressure, that they wouldn’t sacrifice their own truths to go along with the crowd.

Turns out he was wrong. His results showed that a third of the people tested gave the same answer as everyone else in the room, even though it contradicted the truth they saw before them.