At
Plenary this past Sunday, a fellow Haverfordian went up to speak and proposed
an amendment to the Honor Code that I thought had significant applications to
social psychology. His proposition was that for all visual votes, members of
the community who are voting must close their eyes. A visual vote, for example,
is usually how voting at Plenary works. Members of the community will raise
their hands either for or in opposition to an amendment or resolution. Thus,
one individual in the room can see how everyone else is voting. The student who
proposed the amendment was worried that this may cause pressure to conform to
the group, so if a person looks around and sees his or her friends or the
majority of the people in the room voting in favor of something, he or she
would be more likely to also vote “yes” because of the pressure. Likewise, it
could go the other way around if only a small number of people vote in favor of
the amendment or resolution. Even if this individual would like to vote “yes”,
he or she may vote in opposition because that is what the rest of the people in
the GIAC seem to be doing.
There
were several people who stood up to debate this amendment, claiming that they
believe that we are independent individuals who feel strongly and
confidently enough in our own opinions that we should vote what we feel, or
abstain from voting if we truly have no opinion. They think that as
Haverfordians, we won’t vote a certain way just because everyone else seems to
be doing it. While I would like to think that this is true at Haverford, in
which we are discouraged to modify to the group if we do not feel comfortable with
its decision and to take a stand on what we believe, this
amendment would be beneficial, considering the pressure to conform to a group. I'm sure that there are people who are confident enough in
themselves to always act in a way that is synonymous with their beliefs, but there
are just as many people who are swayed by the power of group conformity, even
at Haverford.
The
vote did not go in favor of the amendment, which I think was an overly
idealistic decision. Not all of us at Haverford are super-beings and can rise
above one of the major principles in social psychology, which is the power of
the group. While we have not gone into this concept in much detail in lecture,
there are countless studies that illustrate the power of group conformity. One
of these experiments, the Asch conformity experiment (1951), which I learned
about in either introductory psychology at Haverford or in high school, shows
how strong group conformity can be in a seemingly straightforward situation. In
this study, there was a group consisting of all confederates and one subject. These
individuals had to go around the table and state which line in a group of three
lines matched the indicated line shown on a projector. In one of the rounds,
all of the confederates, out loud, reported the same, incorrect line. When it
came to the subject’s turn to say which line, many of the subjects said the same line as the other individuals
in the group had reported, even though he knew that it was the incorrect choice (Asch, 1956). If group conformity is such a strong
factor in a situation as obvious as this, then wouldn’t there be implications
in any other group setting in which a decision has to be made?
I
can think of several other examples here at Haverford in which group conformity
has won over individual opinion. One example occurred in my pre-lab lecture
for Biology in which we were learning about blood clot formation. My lab instructor asked
the group if we thought that platelets were cells or cell fragments. She then
asked us first, “Who thinks platelets are cells?” Nobody raised their hand,
except one individual who put her hand up and then dropped it again upon
realizing that no one else thought that platelets were made up of cells. All of
the students at Haverford are human and many of us do fall under observed and
tested social phenomena, including group conformity. While I think that closing
our eyes while voting in matters as important as those that are brought up in
Plenary could be a very good thing, I think that the idealism, confidence, and
even pride of the members of our community have prevented us from realizing
this. Needless to say, I voted for this amendment, even though the visual
majority voted against it.
Reference:
Asch, S. E. (1956). Studies of
independence and conformity: I. A minority of one against a unanimous majority [PDF]. Psychological Monographs: General and Applied, 70(9),
1-70. doi:10.1037/h0093718
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