Group Influence on the Perception of Ambiguous Stimuli

An attempt was made to relate the judgements made by subjects in a social pressure situation to the ambiguity of the stimulus being judged. Ambiguity values were assigned to the various stimuli on the basis of responses made by subjects to the stimuli when not exposed to social influence. It was found that conformity was not related to the ambiguity of the stimulus although individual certainty of correctness varied inversely and response time varied directly with ambiguity. It seems possible that this can be accounted for by assuming that the subject's assessment of the difficulty of the judging task was used to rate the value of the group's opinion so that where it seemed that the possibility of arriving at a correct answer was less, the group's influence was less effective. The results indicate that conformity can only be expected to vary directly with ambiguity where the social influence is seen to derive from a source external to the immediate stimulus situation.