Seeing Red 1

Running head: MAJORITY INFLUENCE ON A COLOR RECALL TASK

Why did they all see red?

Contrasting the effects of normative vs. informational influence on a color recall task

Bryan Kennedy (15855492)

bryank@berkeley.edu

Dang Dao, Diana Deguzman, Takuma

Psychology 101
Professor Wickens
Section Fri 9-1;1Sullivan
 Seeing Red 2

Abstract

The effects of conformity were contrasted in an anonymous verses a group environment.

Thirty-five participants completed a color recognition task, which was refined during a

series of pretests to achieve a better than chance accuracy rate. The subjects were divided

into 3 conditions, which differed only by the manner in which they responded: a blank

sheet of paper, a paper with responses already filled in, and a paper written in a group

setting. While the effects of conformity among the three conditions did not differ

significantly, some interesting observations can be noted from the findings.

 Seeing Red 3
Introduction

The purpose of this experiment is to better understand conformity by examining

the relationship between normative and informational influence found in group behavior.

Forty years ago, Milgram et al (1963) established the importance of any study on

conformity with his findings that a majority of individuals would obey an authoritarian

leader to no end. In his groundbreaking study, 60% of subjects ended up administering

what they believed to be fatal electric shocks to others.

Solomon Asch (1951) organized a study that looked specifically at majority

influence, finding that 75% of people would conform to an obviously incorrect majority

at least once. Participants were ushered into a room with seven confederates of the study.

They were seated such that they were always the second-to-last in the row, so they would

know the answers of six of their peers before they themselves answered. Over eighteen

trials, they were asked to view a slide depicting four lines or varying length. It was their

job to determine which of the three lines on the right were the same as the line on the left.

The task varied in ambiguity, but in twelve of the eighteen trials, the confederates were

instructed to give a consistent and incorrect answer. That is, if Line 1 was the same as

Line 2 in the particular slide, they would all answer Line 3. All answers were given

aloud, so that subjects were keenly aware of the answers given by their peers.

In the control experiment, where no confederates were present, only one percent

of trials resulted in an error. In the non-control condition, however, an amazing 75% of

students made at least one error. This suggests that these students were susceptible to

conforming at least some of the time when faced with an overwhelming majority.

Leading researchers in the field have since distinguished between two forms of

conformity in groups: normative and informative. In a study by Deutsch and Gerard

(1955), subjects were given a similar task to that employed by Asch, but were separated
into three conditions. The first condition involved a face-to-face interaction, whereby

subjects gave their answers in a situation where they could see (and be seen) by the

confederates. The second condition added on a group goal, so that the subject felt they

were working as part of a team with the confederates to win a prize for the team with the

best score. A third condition removed the visual interaction of the first group, but

allowing subjects to answer anonymously.

In the group goal condition, subjects produced the greatest number of errors,

suggesting that people will conform most when faced with a present and attentive

majority (48%). The conformity was least in the anonymous activity (23%), suggesting

that group influence is weakest when the group is obscured. The truly interesting finding,

however, was that subjects who responded in the anonymous condition still demonstrated

a significant amount of influence in their answers over the control group.

It seemed then that there were two powers at play here rather than one. First, there

was obviously a strong influence caused by the face-to-face interaction. Second, there

also appeared to be some influence caused by the answers themselves. These findings led

Deutsch and Gerard to propose two new terms to describe group conformity. In

normative influence, an individual will avoid taking a minority position because they fear

being isolated and scorned by the group. In informational influence, however, this

individual joins the majority with the thought that “truth lies in numbers”. They see the

answers of the majority as a fact that supports their answer, which may or may not

outweigh the other factors they use to arrive at their answer.

In their study on conformity in a word-recognition task, Schneider and Watkins

(1996) found that subjects were likely to conform to responses given by a single

confederate, despite the correctness of their initial response. In a follow-up to this study,

Wright et al (2000) found that this finding extends to the recognition of images seen
previously, and does not depend on the contributions of a confederate. Two subjects were

given individual photobooks filled with different cars, and were asked to work together

on a recognition task. Unbeknownst to the subjects, their photobooks were not the same,

so there were many instances where their recognition of a particular car would not have

been seen before by the other subject. However, during discussion, it was found that

those that spoke first were most likely to be successful in “converting” the opinions of the

other, despite the fact that they may have not seen that particular car. This finding

suggests that primacy of response can have an effect on answers.

A face-to-face interaction is not required to induce conformity. In a word-

recognition experiment conducted by Reysen (in press), subjects were convinced that

their responses entered into a computer would be seen by a fellow participant, and they

would likewise be able to view their answers. The setup was illusionary, however, since

the answers being fed back to the terminal were computed using a simple algorithm.

However, it was found that subjects still conformed to the answers provided by this

“virtual confederate”.

Walther et al. (2002) took this a step further by placing four subjects in a room

with computers. Each participant was given the impression that they would be seeing the

answers of everyone else in the group; however, this was illusionary, as all participants

acted independently and saw the answers provided by a computer program. Subjects were

then presented with a variety of slides, and their task was to recall these slides afterward.

The slides were varied in salience, in that some pictures were of items from the same

lexical class (example: hammer, wrench, saw, etc), while others were completely

disparate (example: cat, house, mountain, etc). This resulted in the more distinctive slides

being recalled with greater accuracy. It was also discovered that subjects demonstrated
far less conformity for incorrect answers on slides that were most salient; that is, the surer

they were of the answer, the less they were likely to conform.

For the present study, the experimenters wished to distinguish between normative

and informational influence using a less salient task than that employed in experiments

by Asch, and Deutsch and Gerard. It was hypothesized that such a method would increase

conformity over these original studies. To this end, we developed a color identification

and recall task, whereby subjects were shown a series of colored slides, and then asked to

recall the color of the first slide. According to theories on the serial position effect of

memory, this task of recalling the first slide should be easier than remembering the other

slides (Murdock 1962). To distinguish between the two different types of influence, a 3-

group design was formed. In the control group C, subjects were individually presented

with the task, and were asked to write their answers on a sheet of paper. In group A, the

conditions were the same except that the answer sheet already had bogus answers from

“past participants” indicating the same incorrect answer. In group B, subjects were placed

in a room with four experimental confederates, and wrote down their answer on a sheet

containing the confederates’ incorrect responses. It was proposed that such a design

would result in a visible increase in conformity, with group C being the lowest, followed

by B, and then C with the highest demonstrated conformity.

Method
Participants

Thirty-five volunteers were selected from the UC Berkeley campus. Group C had

13 participants, Group B had 11 participants, and Group A had 12 participants. For

Groups C and A, two experimenters approached individual patrons of Pat Brown’s café,

soliciting subjects by describing the general procedure and time involved. Participation in

Groups C and A required approximately 5 minutes and no rewards were offered.

 For Group B, one experimenter approached loiterers in the Dwinelle Hall quad,

describing the general procedure and offering them an incentive for their participation.

Participation for Group B required approximately 10 minutes and subjects were rewarded

with a candy bar if requested. The data from one subject in Group B had to be

disregarded due to the fact that he arrived when one of the confederates was out of the

room, and thus sat in the incorrect spot.

Apparatus

The slides were presented using a Dell Latitude D600 Pentium-M 1.8Ghz laptop

running Windows XP SP2, with 1GB of RAM, and an ATI Radeon 9000 Mobility 32MB

video card set at 32-bit color. The built-in SXGA+ (1400x1050) LCD screen was set to

the highest brightness setting, which was judged during our pretests to be sufficiently

visible in our two test environments. Microsoft Powerpoint 2003 was used to generate

and display the slides. Colors were selected using the FOCOLTONE® Solid Matte color

wheel provided by Adobe Systems. Four bright, primary colors were chosen for the

slides, all were judged during the pretest to have enough visual saliency to be

distinguished and named consistently: Blue (FOCOLTONE 1076), Red (FOCOLTONE

2237), Yellow (FOCOLTONE 3396), Green (FOCOLTONE 7004). Instructions were

presented as white text on a black background. The answer sheets in all three groups were

identical with the exception of the differing treatments used in Group A/B.

Procedure

Subjects in Groups C (control) and A were selected during two mid-day (11am –

1pm) sessions at Pat Browns café on the north side of the UC Berkeley campus. Subjects

were chosen non-systematically from the patrons inside the café. Though gender was not

overtly recorded in this study, an attempt was made to recruit an equal number of males

and females for all groups.

 One experimenter approached a prospective subject to request their participation,

and, if they accepted, another experimenter brought over the laptop system and answer

sheet and set them up on the table the subject was sitting at. The first experimenter then

advised the subject to read the instructions on the screen carefully, and then both

experimenters faced away from the subject to minimize potential confounds.

To assure consistency across subjects in Groups C and A, all instructions were

presented on the laptop screen for fifteen seconds prior the test. The test itself consisted

of twelve slides, three each of the four colors. Each slide was shown on the screen for

two seconds, without any additional delay between them. The order of the slides was

chosen non-systematically and was the same across all subjects and groups, though no

two of the same color slides ever appeared back-to-back. The first color was blue,

followed by red, yellow, and green.

At the conclusion of the slides, the subjects were instructed to locate the answer

sheet and write down their answer to the question prompt that appeared on that sheet. For

all subjects and groups, the prompt was: “What was the color of the first slide?”.

In Group C, this answer sheet was blank (Figure 1), in Group A, it contained the

responses of four fake previous participants (Figure 2), each having “answered” red.

These answer sheets were shuffled, so the experimenters did not know the subject’s group

assignment until after they returned the sheet. Subsequent to subjects indicating they

were done, the experimenters retrieved the laptop and answer sheet, and debriefed them if

requested.

Subjects in Group B were selected during one mid-day session (10am to 2pm)

session in Dwinelle Hall. They were drawn non-systematically from those in or around

the Dwinelle quad. One experimenter approached potential subjects with the guise that
she needed one more subject for her experiment, to fill the place of a no-show. Each was

promised a candy reward for their participation.

The participants were led by the experimenter to a small room in Dwinelle Hall,

where four confederates were already waiting. The chair closest to the door was left

empty for the subject to sit in. The experimenter then shut off the lights and read the

instructions from the laptop screen aloud to the five now seated around the table.

Following the slide display, a blank answer sheet was passed around from left to right,

with each confederate answering red. That way, the subject was the final person to write

down their answer. At the conclusion of their writing down their answer, the subjects

were debriefed.

Most subjects in Group B were debriefed due to the involved nature of the

activity; subjects in the other two conditions were less likely to ask for a debriefing, so

they were simply thanked at the conclusion of their participation. Those who asked to be

debriefed were told that we were studying group conformity for a Psychology 101

Research Methods class.

Analyses

The data were analyzed using a chi square (χ2), with the level of significance set to 0.05.

Results

Our null hypothesis was that our treatment would have no effect on the data in each of the

three conditions (μC=μA=μB). Our alternative hypothesis was that our conformity

treatment would have some effect on the mean number of correct subject answers among

the three groups (μC≠μA≠μB). In order to reject the null hypothesis, at the level of

significance stated above, and using our degrees of freedom (df) of 2, the χ2 critical value

is a minimum of 5.99.
 For our expected and observed frequencies, we compared the number of subjects

who responded “red”, the incorrect answer used for our conformity treatment. A

significant value in this statistic could indicate that our subjects conformed to the

information presented to them in groups A and B. However, the χ2 value obtained was

0.7448, well below the critical value of 5.99.

In addition, we compared the number of subjects who responded blue, the correct

answer. A significant value in this statistic would show that the mean of each group

differs significantly, and could indicate that subjects in each group differed in their level

of confidence in their answers. Here again, however, our χ2 value of 5.484 was below the

critical value of 5.99 required for rejecting the null hypothesis. According to these results

we have failed to reject our null hypothesis and must assume that the treatments we

employed to induce conformity did not have a significant effect on the answers given by

our subjects.

Discussion

While we ere unable to reject our null hypothesis, this was very likely the result of

having too few participants in our three groups, rather than an inherent flaw in the design

of the study. This was a limitation of the resources available to us, as students.

Though it did not reach the .05 level, we did note an unexpected finding in that

more subjects indicated the correct answer in Group B than in Group C. There are two

possible explanations for this finding. First, the conditions inside Dwinelle Hall were far

more ideal than Pat Brown’s café. Not only was the room darker, allowing for a better

view of the screen, but the overall environment was less distracting. It is entirely possible

that students in Groups C and A were distracted by the commotion in the busy café

environment, and thus did not attend to the slides as well as those in Group B. Though

also not a significant finding, this would explain why Group C exhibited a higher overall
conformity to answering “Red”; Deutsch and Gerard’s study clearly demonstrates that

those who paid less attention to the stimulus were more likely to conform to the

responses of confederates.

Additionally, it is possible that our Group B environment was too informal and

relaxed. Fairey (1986) examined the relationship between self-doubt and attention to the

stimulus when responding in group situations. It was found that, in a high-group-pressure

condition, those with high self-doubt would pay less attention to the stimulus than those

with low self-doubt. The reverse was true for subjects in the low-group-pressure

condition, where high-self-doubters paid more attention to the stimulus than those with

low self-doubt. In the present study, Group B could definitely be considered a low-

pressure group because of the lack of any punishments for an incorrect answer. Subjects

in this group may have also been fairly apprehensive about the experience, considering

that they were given few instructions and entered into a room already filled with other

“subjects”. It is likely that the low-stress environment, ideal viewing conditions, and the

relative nervousness of the students contributed to the relatively low exhibited

conformity.

We were keenly aware that holding Groups C and A in a different location than

Group B would have a detrimental effect on our results. Ideally, we would have preferred

to conduct all our experiments in Dwinelle Hall, but the difficulties in securing a room

for any significant amount of time proved troublesome. To control for the many

confounds caused by this discrepancy, future experimenters with more time and resources

should conduct all three groups under similar conditions.

While in Group B we were attempting to study the effects of conformity in a

group, it is possible that our subjects viewed themselves less as a part of a group and

more as an individual against a group. For normative influence to take place, Turner
(1978) suggests that individuals must identify with a group through some means. Most

often experimentally, this takes shape as a shared group reward of performance, though

group identity can be established through many other social factors. However, the scope

of the current experiment did not allow us to adequately foster such a group identity, and

thus, it is likely that subjects in Group B exhibited less cohesion because they simply did

not trust the other group members, nor feel it important to filter their answer to align with

the group consensus. As a contrasting example, Asch established group trust by running

the same subjects and experimental cohorts across many different trials, allowing the

cohorts to build trust and demonstrate expertise in the minds of the subjects. A more

elaborate version of the current study might increase the number of trials in all groups to

duplicate this cohesive effect.

Lastly, it is also possible that our convenience sample of UC Berkeley students is

not representative of the population at large. A study conducted by Pasupathi (1999), for

example, found that older individuals generally showed less social influence on a task

involving judgments of geometric shapes and emotional faces, than their younger

counterparts. Bond and Smith (1996) also found that the tendency toward social

conformity has declined in the US since the 1950’s (when Asch’s groundbreaking study

was published), due to the increase in pressures of be individualistic. Further confining

the potential findings of our study, is their other finding that conformity differs across

nations; individuals raised in more collectivist nations exhibit a greater predisposition for

conforming.

Though many significant confounds prevented us from arriving at any significant

results, this experimental design is a worthwhile and effective exploration of the effects

of conformity within groups. As one subject asked of the experimenter before being

debriefed, “why did they all see red?”

 References

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