Pranjal Saxena
Y9424
PROJECT PROPOSAL
Mentor: Prof. Amitabh Mukherjee
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Effect of
trust on social conformity in Recognition Memory
Introduction to Area of work:
Individuals rely on a number of techniques to increase the accuracy of long term memory. Many times, while recounting a certain incidence that has happened between a group of friends, even correct memories associated with the incident may be influenced in a negative manner by the accounts later recovered from our peers. Broadly, this behaviour can be attributed to being a part of Social Conformity, an "act of matching attitudes, beliefs, and behaviours to what individuals perceive is normal of their society or social group"[2]. After the pioneering work of Asch in the famous "Conformity Experiment", extensive research has been carried out in analysing the effects of peer pressures in various cognitive functions.
Schneider and Watkins(1996),[3] conducted an experiment on recognition memory using a list of words to be identified as old or new, on placing a confederate as one of the two participants, it was observed that the confederate's opinion highly influenced the participants responses. Reysen(2005), [4] showed that even when participants were tested individually, they wanted to stick to the group opinion previously shown to them. This indicated that peer influence has a role in seeding new memories in individuals. Axmacher, (2010)[1] successfully showed the influence of conformity in recognition memory , using a setup for identifying old and new images from a random sample, where he used 4 confederates to put an implicit pressure on the participant. By varying the test conditions for an easy and difficult sample, he could conclude that in the shorter or easy recognition setup, new items were not rejected only when all the confederates gave a false response. He argued that "differential effects of social conformity on recognition of items as old and new occur in situations with an intermediate level of group pressure. "-directly cited from [1]
Conformity has been shown to depend on a number of factors like majority competence, minority influence, gender(women are perceived to be more conforming than men in accordance with social norms and rituals) and culture. The factor of trust has also been studied within a group, McKelvey, Wendy; Kerr, Nancy H. (1988) [5] argued with respect to normative influence,( conforming to be acceptable and liked by a group), that conformity would be less for a case of group of friends than strangers. Since friends would be more casual and inclimed to accepting the person, pressure to confirm for normative influence might be less. However, studies in terms of alcohol and cigarette abuse, have shown that friends exert more social influence in this regard.
Proposed Work and relation to Axmacher's work:
In this work, I propose to study the effect of conformity on recognition memory in an experiment using 4 confederates and a test participant. Participants would be shown a sample of 50 faces one after the other. Later a mixed set of old and new images would be played, with the participants and confederates identifying them as "old" or "new". To initiate effects of social conformity, participants would be giving their response after listening to the response of each of the confederates.
As the implicit pressure applied by the confederates increases due to a number of them giving the incorrect response, the participant is more likely to conform or adhere to the group, rather than relying on his own memory. This result was successfully obtained by Axmacher where a significant reduction in correct responses for identifying images of human faces was observed, as the number of confederates giving a false response increased.
I plan to extend this result by incorporating the factor of trust and acquaintance in these studies, where the results will be compared with a case when the confederates are complete strangers and unknown to the participant, to the case when the test participant is close friends with the confederates and there is a degree of trust prevalent.
As an hypothesis, the results should show that in the case where the confederates are close friends, there would be a greater tendency to confirm in the participant and the number of accurate responses, specially in the case when all the confederates provide incorrect responses would be much less than the case when the confederates are strangers.
Methodology and Experiment:
1. A database of faces would be used by accessing IIT students records of an old batch, with whom the current residents might not be acquainted (ex Y5 or Y4)
2. A set of 4 confederates as strangers and participants would be chosen who have no interaction. For the other case, the participants and confederates would be close friends. The participants would be convinced to be a part of a "visual recognition test" to analyse the accuracy of visual memory in individuals.
3. For one trial of the experiment, the 5 participants would assemble in a conference room where they would be initially shown a set of 50 images, each being held for a delay of 2 seconds. After a gap of 5 minutes, the participants would be shown sets of faces which contain both the previously shown faces and novel ones. Participants would be asked to identify if the face was old or new, loudly. Its important to note here that the responses would start clockwise from the confederates, in order to make sure that the test participant makes note of their responses, there would be no time limit, and the next image would be shown after the response of the test participant.
4. The confederates would actually be looking at the image name ex "1135" where each digit being even or odd, would help them to make their response. This sample will be carefully doctored in order to have all conditions where the number of incorrect confederate would range from 0 to 4. A sample test setup is as follows, number 5 being the position of the test participant, and responses move from 1 to 5.
Image cited from "Graded effects of Social Conformity on Recognition memory"
by Nikolai Axmacher*, Anna Gossen, Christian E. Elger,Juergen Fell[1]
5. After a requisite number of trials, for both stranger and friend case, the results will be plotted and analysed with a "hit" referring to correct recognition of an old image, and a "false alarm" signifying an identification of a new image as an old one. The number of hits and false alarms are normalised and measured with variation in the number of truthful confederates from 0 to 4. These would be plotted for both the stranger and the friend case and the results will be compared. Modifications can be made by mixing friends and strangers in the confederates and then comparing the outcomes.
Results Expected:
In coherence with the results that Axmacher[1] obtained, as the number of correct confederates would decrease to zero, the number of hits should decrease, This happens because participants conform to the group as the implicit group pressure increases, Also the number of false alarms is expected to increase, however a significant rise is only seen for the case when all the confederates are giving an incorrect response. Thus the correct rejections of new images is less influenced by the confederates response as long as there is no observable trend in all the confederate's response. This is shown below in the image cited from the paper by Axmacher:
As an expected outcome for our modification of the experiment, the number of hits should decrease for the friendly confederate case in comparison to the stranger one, when we consider the case when all confederates give incorrect response. This is expected as there would be an amount of trust and influence by the friends over the memory of the participant. However one factor that could lead to opposite results is that, Individuals would be more relaxed with a lower fear of failure among friends and ready to accept their decision even if it deviates from the group. It would be interesting to study how much this factor counters with the trust aspect in the results obtained.
REFERENCES:
[1]: Axmacher N, Gossen A, Elger CE, Fell J (2010) Graded Effects of Social Conformity on Recognition Memory. PLoS ONE 5(2): e9270. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0009270
[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conformity
[3]: (1996) Response conformity in recognition testing. Psychon Bull Rev 3: 481-485.
[4]: (2005) The effects of conformity on recognition judgements. Memory 13: 87-94.
[5]: McKelvey,
Wendy; Kerr, Nancy H. (1988). "Differences in conformity among friends and
strangers". Psychological
Reports 62 (3): 759-62
Pranjal Saxena
SE 367