The role of self-esteem and social assurance in adolescent conformity to judgement of perceptual illusions

This study seeks to examine the roles of self-esteem and social assurance of adolescents, within the age range of sixteen to twenty years old, in conformity to judgement of perceptual illusions. The study utilized an experimental design. Participants in the experiment were the forty highest and the forty lowest scoring participants (n = 80) from a larger sample (n = 154) that took the Texas Social Behavior Inventory, a measure of self-esteem. The eighty participants were divided into four groups resulting from the treatment combinations of social assurance and self-esteem, namely, (a) high self-esteem participants receiving social assurance (b) low self-esteem participants receiving social assurance (c) high levels of self-esteem participants not receiving any social assurance (d) low levels of self-esteem participants not receiving any social assurance. In all four groups, participants were asked to state their judgments on perceptual illusions after all confederates have expressed uniform judgments. Results indicate that (a) participants with low self-esteem conformed more frequently than participants with high self-esteem (b) participants conformed just as frequently without social assurance as when there was social assurance (c) participants with low self-esteem conformed more frequently than participants with high self-esteem regardless of the presence or absence of social assurance.