Social referencing and conformity
pp. 229-267
in: Saul Feinman (ed), Social referencing and the social construction of reality in infancy, Berlin, Springer, 1992Abstract
About 30 years ago, university students in Oslo and Paris participated in a study of conformity (Milgram, 1961), in which they were asked to determine which of two acoustic tones was the longer one. To answer this relatively simple question—the two tones were of obviously different lengths—the student sat in a booth and responded only after hearing what appeared to be the judgments of five other students who communicated via intercom from adjacent booths. In truth, the "voices' actually were tape recordings of answers to the tone length judgment question. In the critical trials when the "other students' gave the obviously wrong answer, the French students went along with the others' judgment 50% of the time, and the Norwegian students 62% of the time.