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Autokinetic effect and Social Norms

Autokinetic effect and conformity.

Muzafer Sherif is a Turkish American social psychologist.  He conducted a classic experiment on social norm and conformity, testing subjects to watch a pinpoint of light and report how far it moved. Autokinetic effect is a visual phenomenon where a stationary light in a dark room appears to move.  A probably reason is that we perceive distances and motion relative to some reference point.  In a dark environment, no reference point is in sight, so the motion of a single light in undefined. Many people believe that a pinpoint light moves even when it does not.

Sherif uses this phenomena to study how people are influenced by other people opinion.  The experiment has 2 phases.

In phase 1, he studies the reactions of auto kinetic effect individually and recorded each individuals norm. In the end, many people settled on the distance of 2 to 6 inches from trial to trial.

In phase 2, groups of subjects of 2 or 3 where formed and placed in the dark room and came to an agreement.

People who estimated 6 inches began to conform to smaller distances such as 4 inches and people who estimated less than 3 inches increase their judgement to 5 inches.  This shows that people change their distances rather than keep to their own observation in the presence of other opinions.

Afterwards, Sherif repeated phase 1 and to his surprise, they now conform that light is moving about 4 inches whether they know that they were influenced or not.  Group norms appear to establish through levelling off extreme opinions.

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This shows that the group norm influence is greater than the individual norms.  What this means is that in the long run, for a group norm to change, there has to be a greater number of subjects to be able to affect the group norm’s opinion.

Citations:

http://www.integratedsociopsychology.net/Conformity-Majority_Influence/MuzaferSherif’suseofautokineticeffectfor.html

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