Peer Pressure Persuasion

Overview

The purpose of this project was to see how a set of participant´s scores were affected by their peers´ answers. The purpose of this experiment was to test conformity in the youth. This drastically applies to the expanding social lives of youth. I hypothesized that my subjects would change their answers to conform to their peers. To perform this study I found ten subjects between the ages of 13 and 17 who were willing to participate in two testing sessions. In the first testing sessions the participants took a fifteen question test in a calm isolated environment. During the second testing session one participant at a time took an oral version of the test. When the participants took the second test, there were three schoolmates blatantly stating what they were previously told to say in a confident manner. After reviewing my data I concluded that the participants did change their answers, to a certain extent, during the second session. I did find, however, that more than 90 percent of those affected had an increased second score. This was likely the result of how confident the participants were on the answers of certain questions.

Competition history

• ISEF 2016 Systems Software · Entry BEHA010

Resources

• ISEF abstract page ↗

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