Social Influence

The conscious and unconscious pull of social constructs on decision-making

Some of the earliest research into decision-making and bias revolved around social influence. Specifically, conformity - it is hard to go against the group consensus. So just how does this affect our decision-making, and performance?

One of the most famous experiments in psychology is that of Solomon E. Asch and his experiments into judging the length of a group of lines. This appears, and is, a simple task. Look at three lines with one line clearly longer than the other two and report which is the longest line. But when in a group of people with the other group members who had been instructed to report the wrong line as the longest, the majority of study participants also reported a shorter line as the longest even though this was obviously wrong. This was a surprising result at the time and showed that conforming to the group opinion was important. Of note is that even though (or maybe because) these were groups of strangers.

What this showed is that our decisions, in this case on a simple task of judging length of lines, was influenced by others, by what other people are saying and thinking. This is worrying because how can this then play out in more complex social situations or with more complex inputs?