Jean Martin Charcot's Influence Of Social Pressure
900 Words4 Pages
The basic design of the experiment is seven to nine college students are sat in a classroom for a “visual judgment experiment” and they compare the length of lines. The experimenter had two cards, the first card had one line and the second had 3 lines with different lengths. The students were asked to give their answer aloud and in the order of which they were sitting. There was only one student who didn’t know that they were being tested.
In the article, Opinions and Social Pressure, the social psychologist Solomon E. Asch, provides evidence that social pressure has a direct effect on individual’s independency regarding decision making. The debate that takes place in this article concerns, as Asch wrote, “the ways in which human beings form…show more content… Hypnosis was perceived by Jean Martin Charcot as working only on people with hysterical problems. However, through research Asch understood that this view point was outdated. This theory has in fact been tested by researchers who found out that hypnosis was a phenomenon that one; worked with the majority of people and two; “can be considered as an extreme form of suggestibility which is a normal psychological phenomena”(Asch, 1955, p.207). Even simple things like receiving instructions can slightly hypnotize some people. The main breakthrough concerning this research is that the influence of social pressure can potentially lead people to adopt the views of dictators or…show more content… The researchers were looking at their reactions in particular. One at a time the participants gave their answer aloud. The participant (that knew about the experiment) gave the same answer for the first set of cards but as the experiment continued the test subjects were answering different from the majority and became less and less confident about their answers, even though the answers were correct. The results of the research were surprising since normally people would make less than 1% of mistakes in this case under the circumstances they were, the participants made up to 36.8 % (Asch, 1955, p.210). Some participants were able to answer independently despite the pressure of the majority. An important factor was the number of participants who answered the same way. At a point during the experiment the researchers tested the influence of a partner, a participant who takes the side of the test subject, on the minority. If only one person of the crowd agreed with the minority (test subject), the influence of the majority on the test subject diminished. The conclusion to this experiment was that the subject can answer independently whenever there is at least one person on the same side as