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Schlenker, Philips, Bioneicki & Schlenker (1995) indicated that social pressure could produce social anxiety, which can eventually lead to a decrement in performance. To translate this into the world of sports, a strong team may lose a championship game due to social pressure. This social pressure is in the form of self-doubts and fear of failure. However, they disagreed

with the explanation that social pressure may lead to home choking of a certain team. They indicated that those teams which do not perform well at their home field do not suffer from disruptive fantasies of success in front of their supportive audience. Instead, they do not perform well because of fear of failure that creates a social pressure on them. They concluded by giving their advice to a team to take the home field if they can.

Luchins & Luchins (1967) indicated that subject s conformity with social pressure to judge incorrectly would result in his not being to perform an assigned task. In other words, social pressure can cause people to judge incorrectly. In their experiments, they showed that subjects agreed with an incorrect answer after they overheard it from a confederate. They did so because the confederate received a 100 per cent correct score even though he gave incorrect answers. Meanwhile they disagreed with a correct answer after they overheard it from a confederate. They did so because in this case the confederate received a 0 per cent score even though he gave correct answers. They explained that social forces in life are not anti-human. People accept a warning sign in a bottle of poison or a high voltage wire. They have faith that these signs are not deceiving and there is no need to test them. However, if social forces are deceptive, humans may have perished. People need to conform to social norms, values and instructions that are not deceptive but true and helpful. They also need to withstand social pressure that opposes objective evidence.

According to Frith (1997), social pressure can affect a student s performance by influencing his or her motivation. Putting doubts into a student s mind is a form of social pressure that can reduce his or her motivation. Grades and social status can have great motivational power; however, this power is negative most of the time. Meanwhile praising from the instructor and stressing on the importance of learning more than anything else have a positive motivational power. He concluded that motivation to learn is internal and comes from the individual but external social factors (i.e. grades and educators) shape this motivation.

Rewarding a behavior can sometimes make it less likely to occur or improve (Tucker-Ladd). Accordingly, a reward can sometimes be considered as a negative social pressure. For example, a student may study just to get a grade and not because he is interested in the subject he is studying. The desire to learn would be overlooked and hence performance can start to wane. Researches are finding that internal satisfaction in performing important tasks is definitely related to how much people achieve and what their attitudes are toward their work. It is important that a task feel important to a person in order for him to want to perform well with the task. Thus it can be concluded that most people in this pay-off society will definitely depend upon the praise and grades in order for their performance to improve rather than the quality of their efforts. Accordingly, students should perform worse in school when the social attitude presented is not uplifting (i.e. negative social pressure)

Brickman, Linsenmeir & McCareins (1976) had shown that success enhances motivation and future performance if this success is identified as relevant to the student s expectancy about future performance. Meanwhile failure is effective in improving performance when it is identified as irrelevant to the student s expectancy about future performance. On the other hand students who do not expect at all will be less motivated. This can be applied in schools. A teacher can exert a positive pressure by telling a student that it is not the end of the world that this student did not pass the midterm exam, and that he still gets a good chance of passing the course despite the student s expectancy of doing otherwise. A teacher can also exert a positive pressure in a different way. He can do so by telling a student that succeeded a midterm exam that his success means that he can do even better in the final and that this student s expectation of success in the final is very realistic. However, there is a problem with this conclusion; a teacher is simply asked to be double-faced with his student by telling one student that the midterm means nothing and telling another student that the midterm is a strong indicator.

This experiment is trying to investigate not only negative social pressure but also positive pressure. The experimenters are trying to determine if there is any effect of social pressure, whether positive or negative, on academic performance of entering freshmen. The experimenters expect that negative social pressure should hinder academic performance.

Meanwhile, positive social pressure is expected to enhance academic performance.

Method

Participants

Ninety entering freshmen (45 males, 45 females) at Brooklyn College were selected at random and took part in the experiment. Their ages ranged from 17 to 19. The students were all selected without their explicit knowledge of an experiment but were informed of possible test procedures that are conducted at random on entering freshmen by an administrator at the school. The use of random assignment

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