Power of Persuasion

This project investigates the effect of persuasion on people’s decision-making skills. The purpose of this experiment is to prove how people can be easily persuaded by the influence of others despite their confidence. I hypothesized that the people being tested would, in fact, be persuaded to change their answers. This is relevant in many aspects of today’s world as well as relatable to various times in history. For example, the Stanford Prison Experiment was famous for testing those being persuaded by the power of authority. This experiment proves a similar theory. If another person is aggressively commanding someone to make a certain decision, that person was usually successful in forcing the other person to make that decision.

My test consisted of allowing the person being tested to review a poster board for thirty seconds. The poster board was filled with four rows and four columns of pictures of different animals. At the end of the thirty seconds, the person being tested was then asked to recall the animal at the end of the third row: the giraffe. Most of the test subjects chose the correct animal. However, each time someone was tested, there was an extra “test subject” present named Rita. Rita’s job was to pretend that she had never seen the poster board before and that she was also a test subject in the experiment. However, Rita’s real job was to persuade the real test subject to change his or her response. Most often than not, Rita was successful in doing so. She would say things such as, “No it was definitely an alligator.” The test subjects would be skeptical, but she would end up persuading them with her aggressiveness and confidence. The test subjects consisted of both genders ranging from various ages.

My results were very conclusive in that most people proved to fail the test of keeping their initial choices. Although most of the people who were tested knew what the correct answer was, they still let someone persuade them to change their answers. My findings prove that people are easily susceptible of being persuaded by others.

Hypothesis