Activity Type Title

Chapter 1. Chapter

Article

From the Pages of Scientific American

Following the Crowd

From the pages of Scientific American. Following the Crowd. Changing your mind to fit in may not be a conscious choice. Beauty is not just in the eye of the beholder—it is also in the eyes of the beholder’s friends. A study published in April in Psychological Science found that men judge a woman as more attractive when they believe their peers find that woman attractive—supporting a budding theory that groupthink is not as simple as once thought. Researchers at Harvard University asked 14 college-age men to rate the attractiveness of 180 female faces on a scale of 1 to 10. Thirty minutes later the psychologists asked the men to rate the faces again, but this time the faces were paired with a random rating that the scientists told the men were averages of their peers’ scores. The men were strongly influenced by their peers’ supposed judgments—they rated the women with higher scores as more attractive than they did the first time. Functional MRI scans showed that the men were not simply lying to fit in. Activity in their brain’s pleasure centers indicated that their opinions of the women’s beauty really did change. The results fit in with a new theory of conformity, says the study’s lead author Jamil Zaki. When people conform to group expectations, Zaki says, they are not concealing their own preferences; they actually have aligned their minds. In addition, the likelihood of someone conforming depends on his or her place within the group, according to a study in the December 2010 issue of the British Journal of Sociology. Members who are central are more likely to dissent because their identities are more secure. Those at the edges, who feel only partially involved or are new to the group, may have more malleable opinions. The author is Carrie Arnold. Reproduced with permission. Copyright 2011 Scientific American, a division of Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved.

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1.1 Quiz

1. Zaki and colleagues demonstrated that when people were made aware of peer ratings of attractiveness, individual participants’ altered their ratings such that their judgments of attractiveness came closer to the group rating. This is an example of which type of social influence?

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Correct.
Incorrect.

2. Why were Zaki and colleagues so convinced that people were in fact changing their beliefs in the level of the women’s attractiveness as opposed to lying in order to fit in?

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Correct.
Incorrect.

3. The excerpt also discussed other research that found a factor that affected the level of conformity to groups. This factor was:

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Correct.
Incorrect.

4. It’s possible men might not really know how to accurately evaluate a woman’s attractiveness. When faced with a (supposed) normative evaluation, men may change their initial evaluations out of this desire to be accurate in their judgments. This reflects what idea about why people conform?

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B.
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Correct.
Incorrect.

5. Imagine that, instead of presenting participants with the supposed average rating of their peers, participants were asked to change their judgment of attractiveness to a higher or lower number as a favor to the experimenter. In this case, we are not talking about conformity any longer, but about:

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B.
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Correct.
Incorrect.