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Since the students were not explicitly aware of their participation, they were not offered any incentives for volunteering. Participation required one full semester of study at Brooklyn College. The participants were tested simultaneously.

The use of six confederates was also needed. The confederates were all upper-level psychology students at Brooklyn College and were all paid 20 dollars for their help.

Apparatus

In order for the experiment to take place, all that was required was a university that provided grades for the subjects. Also, a suitable meeting place for the experimenters, subjects, and confederates was needed. For this experiment, the college’s orientation day provided this adequately.

Procedure

The study used a single factor, three level design where social pressure was the independent variable and GPA score was the dependent variable. The students were randomly assigned into three groups (15 males, 15 females). The groups were formed by selecting three orientation groups at the orientation meeting. These groups were conveniently setup in the fashion needed for the experimenters’ purposes, with 15 males, 15 females, and 3 orientation leaders. Each group used 2 confederates and 1 experimenter as its orientation leaders. Permission to conduct the experiment in this way was granted by the admissions department at the school. The groups were labeled alpha, sigma, and beta.

The alpha group’s orientation leaders conducted their meeting by mentioning only positive remarks and social statements about studying at Brooklyn College. They praised the quality of education, the amount of helpful opportunities, and the social benefits of graduation from the school. This was done to setup an overall sense of positive social pressure in the students’ minds.

The beta group was treated with an opposite overall sense of social pressure about the school. The orientation leaders only stated negative remarks about the school. They downplayed the quality of education saying that the classes were hard and work loaded. The lack of social advancement upon graduation was also emphasized. For a copy of the briefing sheet given to the confederates refer to Appendix A.

The sigma group was the control group. Their orientation leaders conducted the normal q&a session as directed by the school.

After the orientation, the students’ performance throughout the semester was monitored. If a student was observed to be slipping in their studies as a result of the experiment, they would be informed of their participation and immediately desensitized. Fortunately their were no such incidents. At the end of the semester, all of the GPA’s were recorded. The participants were then informed of their participation and desensitized of any latent effects.

Results

The data were analyzed using a one-way analysis of variance, with the alpha level set at .01. A summary of the statistical data can be found in Appendix B and Figure 1. After analysis, a significant F value of 384.09 was found (critical value.01: 5.39) with a probability of .000. A Tukey’s post hoc comparison of means showed a significant difference between alpha and sigma (HSD=+10.28) and between alpha and beta (HSD=+15.71). There was not a significant result found between the beta and sigma groups (HSD=-5.43).

Discussion

The results of the present experiment confirmed the experimenters’ predictions that social pressure has an effect on academic performance. Further analysis shows that positive social pressure has a significant effect on academic performance. Subjects who were in the positive pressure group show improvement in their performance when compared to the control. It is also shown that the negative social pressure does not seem to have a significant effect when compared to the control. Consequentially, there was a positive significant difference between the alpha and beta groups since the beta average was lower than the control.

The fact that negative social pressure does not affect academic performance contradicts with the results of the experiment by Schlenker, Philips, Bioneicki & Schlenker, (1995). This experiment proposed the idea that social pressure can produce social anxiety, which decreases performance. There were a number of other experiments (Kanter, 1977, Allen & Bragg, 1968) that also proposed that negative social pressure decreases performance, and contradicted with the results obtained in the current experiment. As it was found by Rosabeth Kanter, (1977), the three characteristics of social pressure have a negative impact on the minority group members’ performance in school. In their experiment, Allen and Bragg, (1968) showed how social pressure affects learning acquisition. It was discovered that “veridical feedback” activated negative social pressure and resulted in worse performance than “non – veridical” feedback, which activated positive social pressure, thereby increasing performance.

Positive social pressure had strong effect on academic performance by increasing it significantly. It means that giving people positive impressions such as telling them about the advantages of studying in college and their future perspectives was a better technique in order to make them perform better than frightening them with negative outcomes of their future performance. This idea was supported by Brickman et al, (1976), who stated that “sometimes telling a person that he has done well, that is giving him success feedback, leads to better subsequent task performance than telling him that he has done poorly, that is, giving him failure feedback”.

As it was found in the experiment, positive social pressure does influence academic performance of entering freshmen. This

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