Social pressure and group opinion affect a person's personal judgment but the effect lasts only for three days, a new study finds.
It is not uncommon to get swayed by public opinion and social pressure. It is a well known fact that these factors greatly influence a person's personal judgment. In a new study, researchers from South China Normal University found that this effect lasts only for three days.
"Our findings suggest that exposure to others' opinions does indeed change our own private opinions - but it doesn't change them forever," said psychological scientist and study author Rongjun Yu of South China Normal University, in a press statement. "Just like working memory can hold about 7 items and a drug can be effective for certain amount of time, social influence seems to have a limited time window for effectiveness."
Though previous studies have established an association between social opinion influence and personal judgment, it still remains unclear whether this link is due to people's dire need to fit in to a group, public compliance or personal acceptance. To better understand this link, study authors examined how a group of college students perceived facial attractiveness. The students were shown about 280 photos of Chinese women and asked to rate them according to their attractiveness on a scale of one to eight.
Each person's rating was then compared to the rating of 200 other participants. Researchers found that each participant's rating matched group rating 25 percent of the time. On other occasions, the participant's rating was 1, 2, or 3 points above or below the group's average rating.
For the second part of the study, researchers called the students back to rate the photos after either 1 day, 3 days, 7 days or 3 months had passed. Researchers noted that group ratings affected a participant's rating when he re-rated the pictures one to three days after the initial rating session. However, no such influence was observed when participants re-rated pictures more than three days after the initial rating session.
Researchers were still not able to determine why the effect lasted for only three days. They plan on conducting further studies to understand this mechanism better. They also plan to look into whether this duration can be manipulated to last for shorter or longer durations.
The study was funded by the National Natural Scientific Foundation of China and the Scientific Research Foundation of Graduate School of South China Normal University. Findings were published online in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
