Peer Pressure, Starting Even Earlier Than Previously Imagined
Peer pressure – the phrase that makes parents awfully afraid for their socially impressionable young children. We’ve all had those guest lecturers in high school come in to tell us about how “we are our own person” and how we shouldn’t succumb to the whims and pressures of others, whether it’s regarding alcohol, drugs, hazing – or knowingly reporting false information in order to fit the norm?
Daniel Haun, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, recently conducted a study involving 96 four-year-old girls and boys. For part 1 of the experiment, they divided the children up into 24 groups of four and gave three of them the same picture book and the fourth one that looked the same, but was slightly divergent in terms of pictorial content. They were asked to look at the “same” picture of a group of family members and identify the right-most figure. As Haun explained, “The child with the divergent book was confronted with the — from his or her point of view — false but unanimous judgment of three peers.” For part 2, the children were told to determine whether a lamp was on or off and then either speak that answer aloud or point silently to the correct choice.
What he discovered was that even four-year-olds are aware of the social pressures of conforming to the norm. For the picture books, out of 24 children, 18 conformed at least once despite knowing that they were giving an incorrect answer by doing so. In the lightbulb scenario, 12 out of 18 conformed to the majority at least once when speaking their answer aloud, and only 8 of 18 conformed to the majority when giving their answer silently (so that no other children could hear).
Other forms of peer pressure aside, this becomes important with regard to information cascades further along in life, relating to things like political elections or restaurant choices. Information cascades describe a situation where every individual bases their thoughts on the observations of others and then makes the same decision independent of his or her own private signal. It usually seems sensible to do what other people are doing – however, cases like the above experiment prove that that is not always the case. Even knowing that what they were saying was incorrect, a solid 75% of the children chose to conform to the majority, which seems baffling when considering how the visual cue gave them almost a 100% guarantee that they were correct. These types of statistics indicate that erroneous information cascades can certainly be crafted out of fear of social rejection and peer pressure (even when peers aren’t doing so knowingly).
I’ve personally been told multiple times about the amazing wonders of one particularly upscale restaurant in Washington, DC, but when I went I found myself disappointed by the price to portion to level of deliciousness ratios. Following up with some people I knew about my opinion on the matter, I elicited responses like “Oh, well, yeah, I was kind of disappointed by their portion size” and “Actually, I really didn’t like the fish, I should have warned you off of it.” I’m not sure why so many people had recommended it initially, since the quality wasn’t the best and the price was so high. Maybe they wanted to look posh and socially aware. Maybe it’ll turn in the opposite direction now.
Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/10/111025090353.htm