Description:
Some different studies have pointed out that the social influence on the judgments depends on the level of certainty of the subject. The purpose of the reported experiment is to test the hypothesis that the level of certainty of the subject is also influenced by the responses of other persons. The task requires a judgment on the number of elements of the stimulus with a brief presentation ; the subject makes a private estimation and rates his certainty about the validity of his estimation ; after the experimenter communicated to the subject four relatively near judgments selecled from responses by some other people, the subject expresses once more his certainty about his personal estimation. Results point out a negative relation between the change of certainty after communication and the distance of the first judgment of a subject to the central response of the four communicated responses : the level of certainty increases when the first response of the subject is near of the modal response and decreases when it is far from it. It seems that for the subject, the judgments of other persons disprove or prove the validity of his own estimation, that emphasizes the role of cognitive processes in situations of social influence.