Changes in Liberalism-Conservatism of College Students since the Depression

Summary

One hundred and twenty female subjects took part in an experiment to explore the necessity of deceiving subjects about the purpose of a conformity experiment. The subjects were randomly assigned to one of three groups: no information, partial information, or complete information about the purpose of the experiment. In addition, group pressure to conform was given to half of the subjects on trials on which the correct response was fairly obvious and to the other half on trials on which the correct response was somewhat ambiguous. Anova revealed a significant effect only for item difficulty. The statistic omega squared indicated that none of the variance in the conformity scores could be attributed to amount of information about the purpose of the experiment, either alone or in interaction with item difficulty. It was suggested that these results raise severe doubts about methodological assumptions commonly employed in social Psychology