Sandr In Solomon Asch's Opinions And Social Pressure

Have you ever thought about the preparation and thought that goes into a research experiment? There are many things to consider when planning a study, such as the questions you are trying to answer, the variety of participants that will be studied, and the different variations in the experiment. An important part of the experiment that can have a significant impact on the results are the variables chosen. In doing this, the researcher can easily tell what factors have an effect on the topic under study. There are many different factors to consider that play a part in experimental procedures. Without these variables, researchers would have a hard time making a claim about a particular topic, because they did not consider all sides of the experiment. An example of the variations done in experiments can be seen throughout Solomon Asch’s “Opinions and Social Pressure,”

Gregory Berns completed an experiment that tried to find an answer to Solomon Asch’s questions by using M.R.I. scanners to look at the brain while the subjects were under social pressure. The researchers found that standing up for one’s beliefs showed up in the part of the brain involving emotion, which suggests that there is an emotional dilemma that comes with going against the group. But social conformity, on the other hand, shows up in the part of the brain dealing with perception, which shows that “seeing is believing what the group tells you to believe” (Blakeslee 2). Or in other words, other people’s opinions of an answer can lead to clouded judgment when perceiving things on your own. Although this experiment only utilizes one other variable, the MRI scanner, it shows how psychologists will use different variations of an experiment to see what is really causing an issue. This reading also relates to the first one, because it is simply an extended study from Solomon Asch using a different variation of the