This study deals with the area of social psychology and the topic of conformity. Conformity is a type of social influence involving a change in belief or behaviour in order to fit in with a group. Myers stated in (1999), An active form of social influence is Compliance which is when an individual changes his or her behaviour in response to an explicit or implicit request made by another person. There have been many experiments in psychology investigating conformity and group pressure. Jenness (1932) used an ambiguous situation involving a glass bottle filled with beans as there was no clear answer on how many beans were actually in the jar. He investigated whether an individual would conform when asked to guess the number of …show more content…
The aim of the present research was to find out whether male or females conformed when asked the question “What is your preferred temperature of a room?” With the experimental hypothesis ‘females will give a higher temperature than males when showed a picture of a classroom with a fake high temperature and asked what their preferred temperature is’ and the null hypothesis being that there will be no difference between the preferred room temperature of males and females when given a false high …show more content…
The median was calculated by finding the middle number from the range of data and the mode was calculated by seeing which number occurred the most often. The mean was calculated by adding up all the values and dividing by the total number of data received for each column. The range of values was then calculated by taking the difference between the highest and lowest values of the preferred temperature.
The mean, median, mode are given as they are appropriate measures of central tendency for interval data, as is the case of preferred room temperature in regards to a classroom setting. The mean is best because it takes all the values of the data into account but the median is also useful because it is not affected by extreme scores. The range gives a measure of how dispersed the scores were and thus gives a fuller description of the data sets and the mode shows the most common temperature preferred by the two experimental conditions. Summary Table
The table shows the preferred temperature in each experimental condition. The raw data and calculations of the means, medians, modes and ranges are shown in Appendix