Some Conformity Effects Are Short-Lived

There is often strong social pressure for people’s judgments and beliefs to conform to those of people around them.  It can be hard to be the only person in a group to express a divergent opinion.  At times, people will actually express an opinion closer to that of others while with a group in order to fit in.

What is the long-term impact of this conformity?

It is difficult to study this question, because it is hard to set up situations in which people disagree.  In addition, it is hard to get enough observations for each person to be able to make a strong statistical claim about the effect of conformity.

An paper by Hi Huang, Keith Kendrick, and Rongjun Yu in the July, 2014 issue of Psychological Science explored this question using judgments of facial attractiveness.  Although the study is not entirely satisfying, it has some intriguing effects. 

In this study, participants rated the attractiveness of 280 faces on a scale from 1 (not very attractive) to 8 (very attractive).   After making their rating, participants saw a rating that they were told reflected the average rating from 200 other people who had seen the same picture.  The rating they saw was either the same as the one they gave, or was between 1 and 3 points higher or lower.

Across studies, participants then returned to the lab 1, 3, or 7 days later, or 3 months later.  Then, they rated the attractiveness of the same set of faces. 

It is actually difficult to examine the second set of ratings statistically.  The group rating can only be substantially higher than the participant’s rating for faces that the participant rated as relatively unattractive.  The group rating can only be substantially lower than the participant’s rating for those that the participant rated as relatively attractive.  So, changes in the rating from one session to the next might just reflect a tendency to move more extreme ratings toward the middle of the scale.

The researchers used a statistical technique to control for this tendency for high ratings to get lower and for low ratings to get higher.  With this statistical control, they found that faces that they rated as attractive in the first session were seen as less attractive in a subsequent session when the group rating was lower than the participant’s rating.  However, this effect occurred only when the section session was 1 or 3 days after the first session.  By 7 days later (and also 3-months later), there was no significant effect of the group rating on the participant’s later rating.

This result suggests that when people hear an opinion that deviates from their own, there is a small tendency to revise their opinion in the direction of the group.  However, these effects are small and short-lived.  After about 3 days, the group influence seems to be gone.

On the one hand, this is an intriguing finding.  It suggests that just being exposed to the opinions of other people once does not necessarily have a long-term influence on a person’s beliefs.

That said, there is a lot more work that needs to be done on this issue.  People see many faces each day, and so it is not clear why group judgments about attractiveness ought to have a long-term impact on people’s beliefs.  In contrast, political beliefs or social beliefs might be more susceptible to the impact of other people.  In addition, people made a total of 280 judgments in each session of the study.  It is hard to believe that participants could really remember the judgments of others.  Indeed, it is surprising that there was any effect of the group judgment at all in this study. 

In the end, this study provides an interesting demonstration of how hard it can be to test what seems like a straightforward question.

Forgiving Allows Forgetting

We have all heard the adage Forgive and Forget.  The advice itself makes sense.  When someone has done something wrong to us in the past, bearing a grudge will make all interactions later difficult.  If you are always remembering the details of what someone has done wrong to you, then you are forced to relive those details in ways that bring those past events vividly into the present.

So, when you have forgiven someone, it is valuable to also forget the details of what they have done.

But, does that actually work?  Does forgiveness allow you to forget those details of a past transgression?

This question was explored in an interesting paper in the July 2014 issue of Psychological Science by Saima Noreen, Raynette Biermann, and Malcolm MacLeod. 

In an initial session, participants read a variety of scenarios in which they imagined that someone had done something wrong to them.  Each scenario described the person, the event, and the person did afterward.  Participants asked whether they would forgive the person for what they had done.  The scenarios involved a variety of transgressions including lying, infidelity, and theft. 

From people’s responses, the experimenters selected twelve items that people were willing to forgive and twelve that they were not willing to forgive. 

In the second session, the experimenters explored people’s ability to forget the details of the scenarios.

First, participants read 24 scenarios that were paired with words that could be used to remind people of the scenario.  Half the scenarios were ones that participant was willing to forgive and half were ones that participant was not willing to forgive.  Participants practiced associating the words with the scenario until they could recall the scenarios after hearing the word with better than 50% accuracy.

Then, for half of the items they learned, participants saw the word gain and were given a new set of instructions.  Those in the Think condition were given one of the words and were told to think about the scenario associated with the word and to state how the transgressor made amends for their mistake.  Those in the No Think condition were told to avoid thinking about about the scenario associated with the word.  The other half of the items that were not part of the Think or No Think conditions were used as a baseline.

Last, participants were asked to recall all of the scenarios given the cue words they had learned.

Overall, participants were equally good at learning to associate scenarios with words regardless of whether they were willing to forgive the transgressor or not. 

However, the recall data following the Think or No Think conditions was interesting.  For scenarios in which the participant was not willing to forgive the transgressor, these conditions did not have any influence on later recall.  For scenarios in which the participant was willing to forgive the transgressor, participants in the No Think condition recalled fewer scenarios (and fewer details of those scenarios) than participants in the Think condition.  The baseline items came out in between the two conditions.

What is going on here?

Previous research suggests that the instructions used in the No Think condition can make it harder for people to recall details of things they learned or experienced in the past.  These results suggest that the No Think instructions work for transgressions that people are willing to forgive, but not those they are not willing to forgive.

This result suggests that forgiveness may actually give people permission to forget.  That is, when people are willing to forgive, then they are willing to give up the details an episode.  But, when they are unwilling to forgive, they keep those details around.  Presumably, they will also re-experience those details negatively when they remember them in the future.

There are a number of interesting studies that remain to be done to understand this result better.  For one, this study used all hypothetical scenarios.  It would be interesting to look at the relationship between forgiving and forgetting with situations people actually experienced.  For another, this study focused on the relationship between forgiving and forgetting.  It would also be interesting to know whether inducing people to forget details of an event would influence their tendency to forgive.