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Abstract
Humans are social beings and often have to perceive and perform within groups. In conflict situations, this puts them under pressure to either adhere to the group opinion or to risk controversy with the group. Psychological experiments have demonstrated that study participants adapt to erroneous group opinions in visual perception tasks, which they can easily solve correctly when performing on their own. Until this point, however, it is unclear whether this phenomenon of social conformity influences early stages of perception that might not even reach awareness or later stages of conscious decision-making. Using electroencephalography, this study has revealed that social conformity to the wrong group opinion resulted in a decrease of the posterior-lateral P1 in line with a decrease of the later centro-parietal P3. These results suggest that group pressure situations impact early unconscious visual perceptual processing, which results in a later diminished stimulus discrimination and an adaptation even to the wrong group opinion. These findings might have important implications for understanding social behavior in group settings and are discussed within the framework of social influence on eyewitness testimony.
Acknowledgments
We thank Eva Walther for helpful discussions during the design development, Toralf Neuling for help with stimulus creation, Christina Lavallee for helpful comments during proof reading, Kathrin Bock, Andrea Finke und Marie Meemken for support during data collection, Nicole David for helpful comments during the revision process, and all participants for their participation. This work was supported by the Volkswagen Foundation.