Testing Fear of Social Isolation
SE367 Course Project Mentor:
Aman Pandya (11481) Prof Amitabha Mukerjee
Links:
Abstract:
Why do we strive to be socially acceptable? Why is being acceptable to the society so important for us? It has been experimentally proved by Solomon Asch that people do alter their behaviour to fit into the society. Taking direct inspiration from Asch’s work, German political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann proposed the Spiral of Silence theory which was fundamentally based on fear of social isolation. I replicate here part of an experiment done by Shoemaker, Breen and Stamper to test fear of social isolation via correlating fear of negative evaluation with discrepancy between personal opinion and majority opinion as well as with willingness to express majority opinion. In addition to original experiment, it has also been well documented that women are more likely to succumb to social pressure. So, I also intend to measure gender variations in fear of social isolation, again by using fear of negative evaluation scale developed by Watson and Friend.
Hypotheses:
1. The more a person fears negative evaluation, the less discrepancy there will be between the person’s opinion and perception of the predominant opinion.
2. The more a person fears negative evaluation, the less likely he or she will be to discuss a minority opinion.
Results:
1. Irrespective of their FNE scores, people placed their opinions very close to each other.
2. People tend to voice their opinions irrespective of their FNE score.
3. No considerable gender bias in FNE ratings.
References:
1. Shoemaker, Breen and Stamper (2000) ‘Fear of Social Isolation: Testing an assumption from the Spiral of Silence’, Irish Communications Review, Vol 8, 2000.
2. Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann. ‘The Spiral of Silence: Public Opinion - Our Social Skin.
3. Asch, S.E. (1951) ‘Effects of group pressure upon the modification and distortion of judgements’.
4. Asch, S.E. (1952) ‘Group forces in modification and distortion of judgements’.
5. Watson, D. & Friend, R. (1969) ‘Measurement of social evaluative anxiety’.
6. Monfries, M.M. & Kafer, N.F. (1994) ‘Private self-consciousness and fear of negative evaluation’, The Journal of Psychology.