How Does Peer Pressure Support Affect Performance?

Overview

Objectives/Goals My project was to determine the effect of positive or negative feedback by a group of peers, on performance. The feedback (support) is of a personal nature, and unrelated to the task being performed. Methods/Materials Individuals were blindfolded and asked to negotiate through a maze, consisting of posts and ropes. A chorus of people either made positive or negative comments about the person. These comments were not related to the taskbeing performed but were of a personal nature. The same task was also performed with no feedback at all. The times it took to complete the maze was recorded and compared. Results People had shorter times with positive feedback than with negative feedback, but the shortest times of all were with no feedback at all. Conclusions/Discussion I concluded tht creatign a positive and supportive atmosphere around a person can enhance their ability to perform a task when compared to perfoming the same task in a negative atmosphere. However, both types of feedbak in this particular experiment seemed to lessen the person's ability to concentrate on the task, since most subjects has their shortest times with no feedback at all.

Competition history

• CSEF 2002 Social Sciences (Junior Division Only) · Entry J1711

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

• All Behavioural and Social Sciences projects
• CSEF Behavioural and Social Sciences projects
• Every CSEF 2002 project