Nicolas, S., Gounden, Y., & Sanitioso, R. B. (2011). Alfred Binet, the first investigator of the group conformity effect. Psychology & History / Psychologie et Histoire, 11, 51-82.

Alfred Binet, the first investigator of the group conformity effect

Serge NICOLAS Paris Descartes University

Yannick GOUNDEN Paris Descartes University

&

Rasyid Bo SANITIOSO, Paris Descartes University

Key words: Binet, conformity, memory, eyewitness, testimony, suggestibility, misinformation.

Running head: Alfred Binet and the group conformity effect

Note 1

Correspondence to Serge Nicolas, Institut de Psychologie, Laboratoire de

Psychologie et Neuropsychologie Cognitives FRE CNRS 3292, 71 avenue Edouard Vaillant, 92774 Boulogne-Billancourt Cedex, France, or email : [email protected]

Nicolas, S., Gounden, Y., & Sanitioso, R. B. (2011). Alfred Binet, the first investigator of the group conformity effect. Psychology & History / Psychologie et Histoire, 11, 51-82.

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Abstract In his book ―On suggestibility‖, Alfred Binet (1900) had children participants engage in a series of experiments that helped establish a scientific foundation for a psychology of testimony and culminated in insightful observations on the phenomenon of social contagion. Chapter VII of this book presents the first systematic investigation of a group conformity effect among schoolchildren. Binet used six objects pasted on a large poster that the children had to memorize. Confronted with a memory questionnaire designed to produce very strong suggestions leading to false memories, the grouping of children produced three main results: 1° A division of functions: some become leaders, others followers; 2° An increase in suggestibility; and 3° A strong tendency toward imitation, i.e. a conformity effect which constitutes one of the most marked characteristics of the psychology of groups. We provide an original historical introduction followed by an English translation of this pioneer chapter that today exists only in his native French.

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Though Alfred Binet (1857-1911) was a prolific writer (for a biography see Wolf, 1973), much of his work remains unknown (Siegler, 1992). For example, his 1900 book on suggestibility has remains undiscovered, in part, due to a lack of English translation. The centenary of his death provides an occasion to examine his work beyond intelligence testing (Fancher, 1985). His vast interests incorporated diverse aspects of mental life, and particularly suggestibility. This led him to be a pioneer in the science of testimony and in experimental social psychology. Though Binet’s reputation and work in many areas have not been recognized, we believe that the work of this French psychologist is remarkable in many ways and deserving of recognition. In particular, he was among the first investigators to study the influence of suggestions on memory and the entire issue of what today would be called false memory or memory illusions (Roediger, 1996). We take the opportunity of the centenary of Binet’s death to honor his contributions to social psychology and provide an English translation of an important chapter of his book on suggestibility (Binet, 1900) that today exists only in his native French. Because so little of Binet’s work has been translated into English, it is perhaps for this reason that many English speaking psychologists do not recognize his importance to the field as captured recently in a popular book in history of psychology. Although he is known as the inventor of the first test of intelligence, Hunt (2007, p. 251) nonetheless underlines that ―Alfred Binet… was not a great psychologist; he formulated no important theory, made no brilliant discoveries, and was not a charismatic teacher…‖ However, this French psychologist was in fact a pioneer in psychology and produced numerous important works in diverse areas, such as applied psychology and experimental social psychology. Binet’s first experiment on the influence of suggestibility (1894) It was during the school year 1892-1893 that Alfred Binet and Victor Henri conducted studies on the influence of suggestibility on children’s memory performance. They studied how students aged 7 to 13 years remembered a line of a given length (16mm, 40mm, or 68mm) that had been drawn using a pencil on a white cardboard and was presented for 5 seconds. In the recognition test the children had to choose the correct line among a range of lines arranged in ascending order (from 1mm to 72mm). Binet and Henri (1894) tried to estimate the effect of natural suggestion as a function of children’s age (for a recent English translation of this 53

paper, see Nicolas, Collins, Gounden & Roediger, 2011a). The authors’ primary aim was not to discern if children were prone to suggestions (they assumed they were), but rather to know how they became suggestible. Suggestion was manipulated in various ways under conditions of uncertainty for the children. For example, in a typical situation, the experimenter presented during the test a direct suggestion. A model line of 40 millimeters in length was presented to a child, who subsequently had to recognize it on a board that consisted of several lines including the model line. In this case, suggestion was provided verbally by the experimenter. Just after the child designated a line as equal to the model line, the experimenter then said: ―Are you sure? Is it not the neighboring line?‖ The results revealed that under the influence of this direct suggestion made in a soft tone of voice, the majority of children abandoned the line they first indicated and chose the suggested one. The results also showed that younger children were more influenced by suggestion than were older ones. It is important to note that at the end of their paper, Binet and Henri (1894) presented in a few words a last situation called collective suggestion where several children were placed in front of the board containing the lines during the test and were asked to respond collectively. The results revealed that children generally (a) gave more exact answers in a group situation; (b) the youngest often had uniform and unanimous answers (the first answer given by one of the children was usually accepted and followed by the other members of the group), but (c) the oldest children were more likely to express themselves in an independent manner (the first answer given by one of the children was not always accepted by the other members of the group). Binet and Henri’s research on suggestibility in visual memory was adapted by Asch (1951, 1952, 1956). Asch’s work has had a profound impact on how psychologists think about and study social influence in groups. As noted by Levine (1999): ―Asch reported an ingenious series of experiments on social influence in groups that have since attained the status of classics.‖ However Asch used not only Binet and Henri’s techniques but also their actual experimental task from the 1894 paper. However Solomon Asch (1907-1996) never cited Binet and Henri’s work (see Nicolas, Collins, Gounden & Roediger, 2011b). Beginning with a basic laboratory task (Binet & Henri, 1894), Binet (1900) had children participants engage in a series of new experiments that help to establish a scientific foundation for a psychology of testimony (Stern, 1939, Loftus, 1979) and culminated in insightful observations on 54

the phenomenon of social contagion (Cunningham, 1988; Roediger, Meade & Bergman, 2001). Binet’s latter experiments on suggestion and the psychology of testimony (1900) For several months, Binet was able to study suggestibility in children, and found that the memory of these participants could be influenced by simple suggestions. Indeed, he conducted new experiments published in the never translated into English book ―On suggestibility‖ (Binet, 1900) that established the role of comments or orders (suggestions of the experimenter) on the acts of remembering in subjects studied both individually or in groups. The results of these experiments extended those published in Binet’s earlier article from 1894. In the long chapter VI of his book on ―l’interrogatoire‖, Binet (1900, pp. 244329) dealt with the psychology of the testimony. He explicitly took the role of an investigating judge and estimated the truthfulness of the memories of his participants or witnesses. The procedure consisted of asking participants to observe six objects in detail (a coin, a button, a stamp, a tag, a photograph, and image of a crowd), each presented for 12 seconds, and to memorize as many details as possible of what they had seen. After having studied the material, participants were asked either to respond to a series of questions concerning the details of the objects or simply to describe what they remembered about the objects. Participants remembered fewer details in the latter condition, but were more accurate in their recall. The results seemed to indicate that the form of the questions had a strong influence on memory. Indeed, there were questions that, by their form alone, have a formidable suggestive capacity (see also Loftus, 1975). Though seemingly innocuous, he found the questions affect responses, and very specific, but entirely false, memories could be created. He also noted that in the judicial domain, rich details of a testimony were not an effective gage of the exactness and accuracy of a recollection (Binet, 1900, p. 283). False memories studies have confirmed this observation (see Roediger, 1996). Binet underlined that if you desire faithful testimony from a child you must not ask him/her any question, nor allow him/her to make oral report, but require him/her to write down spontaneously what he/she knows. This is especially true of children because they are less capable than adults to distinguish between facts and fiction. Binet’s research on suggestibility is similar to the influential line of work begun by Elizabeth Loftus and her colleagues 55

on the effects of suggestions on visual memory (e.g., Loftus & Palmer, 1974; Loftus, Miller & Burns, 1978). In the Loftus misinformation experiments, subjects studied a scene and later asked to determine if certain items were in the scene, though they were not actually present. Relative to participants in control conditions, subjects incorporated the misleading suggestions into their recollections of the scenes and would later report recalling or recognizing them. This chapter of Binet’s book on suggestibility was largely ignored in France for the important implications it held for the study of eyewitness testimony (Binet, 1905). However, his work was later developed by a former student of Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850-1909), the German William Stern (1871-1938) who was able to generate interests in the academic and legal communities (Stern, 1903-1904) by adapting some of his research methods. Binet’s experiments on suggestion and the group conformity effect (1900) In the following chapter VII of his book on ―l’imitation‖, Binet (1900, pp. 330-359) dealt with the ―group conformity effect.‖ When a small group of children were asked to respond to questions together, a leader naturally emerged who provided incorrect answers that were nonetheless adopted by the rest of the group. To study what he called ―imitation‖, Binet used the same material as the one used in the preceding chapter, i.e. six objects pasted on a large poster. The poster on which the objects were set was dark yellow and square in shape, 22 centimeters long and 15.5 centimeters tall. We present, in figure 1 the picture of the whole board on which the 6 items were fixed (with the 6 items fixed upon it).

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Figure 1. Picture of the poster (see Binet, 1900, p. 250).

We also give a special individual photograph and the size of each of the 6 objects accompanied with a description of the essential information (for further details, please refer to the figures).

Figure 2. The French coin

The penny. - It is glued on to the board; we can see a face, more precisely the portrait of Napoleon III, without a crown. The penny is old and dirty. It shows deterioration at the bottom and slightly to the right in its outline, there is an area of several millimeters which is smooth, free of drawings, as if it had been struck with a hammer.

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Figure 3. The store price tag

The store price tag. - It is a label of the stores called Bon Marché. The label is glued to the board and is traversed by a pin in a bottom to top direction. It is green.

Figure 4. The button

The button. - Glued to the board, it is circular with a raised edge and is pierced with four holes through which no thread is seen. It is made of corozo and the color is dark brown, mottled with brown.

Figure 5. The portrait

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The portrait. - This picture is taken from a chronophotographic series of Georges Demeny.

Figure 6. The photograph of a crowd

The photograph. - This picture, which was cut from an illustrated newspaper, depicts a scene of the postmen’s strike that had taken place two weeks before the experiment.

Figure 7. The French stamp

The stamp. - It is a 2 cents French stamp, colored red-brown and is glued to the board.

All children knew these objects, they knew that the penny was French, they knew and distinguished the effigy of Napoleon III on the penny and they knew of the Bon Marché stores, which were located less than 1 kilometer away from the school; the button was of common shape and color that could not surprise children; the stamp

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was known by all children, except for a few. The portrait bore nothing special except the grimace of a man. Finally, the picture which represents postal workers on a strike, illustrates an event that several children had heard, because the event dominated all of Paris a few days ago. In summary, the 6 items were not difficult to interpret by the children, and some items were even familiar. To study suggestions, Binet used a questionnaire which was designed to produce very strong suggestions. Because he used written suggestions, his method did not consist in directly attracting attention to the inaccurate information suggested. Instead it consisted of implicitly accepting the suggestion as a fact and to take it as the starting point for another question. Thus, instead of asking: "the man's portrait, wasn’t there a hat on his head?" - he asks: "draw the shape of the hat he had on his head". This question could only be understood if the hat exists, therefore, he did not question the existence of the hat and he did not incite the participant to ponder on this detail or put it in doubt. Another way to highly induce suggestion was to create a dilemma, thus he asked: Is the portrait brown or blue? – Although in truth it was black. Here is the questionnaire (strong suggestion with 13 questions) used by Binet in his new experiments and adapted from the third questionnaire (strong suggestion) used in chapter VI (pp. 299-300):

Button.

1 ° There are four holes. What color is the string that passes through these holes and fixes the button to the board? 2° Draw the part where the button is a little damaged.

Portrait.

3° Is it dark brown or dark blue? 4° The man has his left leg crossed over the right leg or the right leg on the left one? 5° Draw the shape of the hat on his head. 6° What is the object in his right hand?

Coin.

7° It has a small hole. Where is this little hole? Draw.

Stamp.

8° The postmark is in the right corner. What city name can be distinguished on the stamp? Draw.

Label.

9° Draw the string with which it is attached to the board.

Crowd.

10° At what spot is the little dog? 11° How is the being man arrested by police agents dressed?

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12° What is the seventh item? 13° What is the eighth item?

Confronted with this questionnaire the grouping of children produced three main results: 1° A division of functions: some become leaders, others followers. The children, having been grouped together randomly, showed no sense of solidarity, each answering for himself, and each seeking to be the first to answer. The first one to answer was subsequently considered implicitly as the leader. 2° An increase in suggestibility. By the simple fact of being grouped together, the children became more suggestible, and this increase in suggestibility resulted from complex causes. 3° A strong tendency towards imitation, i.e. a group conformity effect. Indeed, many children imitated the answers of other children. This contagion constitutes one of the most marked characteristics of the psychology of groups. As noted by Siegler (1992, p. 185), although the particular answer advanced by the leader varied among the groups, few children challenged whatever answer the leader advanced, even when it was plainly wrong. Thus, Binet’s research was the first systematic investigation of group conformity (see Cunningham, 1988).

The paper What follows (after the References) is a translation of Binet’s (1900) chapter VII (pp. 300-359) important contribution to help bring it to the attention of the Englishspeaking world.

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References

Asch, S. E. (1951) Effects of group pressure upon the modification and distortion of judgments. In H. Guetzkow (Ed.), Groups, leadership and men; research in human relations (pp. 177-190). Oxford, England: Carnegie Press. Asch, S. E. (1952). Social Psychology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Asch, S. E. (1956). Studies of independence and conformity: I. A minority of one against a unanimous majority. Psychological Monographs, 70, 70. Binet, A. (1900). La suggestibilité [On suggestibility]. Paris: Schleicher. Binet, A. (1905). La science du témoignage [The science of testimony]. L’Année Psychologique, 11, 128-136. Binet, A., & Henri, V. (1894). De la suggestibilité naturelle chez les enfants [On natural suggestibility in children]. Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Etranger, 38, 337-347. Cunningham, J. L. (1988). The pioneer work of Alfred Binet on children as eyewitnesses. Psychological Reports, 62, 271-277. Fancher, R. E. (1985). The intelligence men. New York: Norton. Hunt, M. (2007). The Story of Psychology. New York: Random House. Levine, J. M. (1999). Solomon Asch’s legacy for group research. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3, 358-364. Loftus, E. F. (1975). Leading questions and the eyewitness report. Cognitive Psychology, 7, 560–572. Loftus, E. F. (1979). Eyewitness testimony. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Loftus, E. F. & Palmer, J. C. (1974). Reconstruction of automobile destruction: An example of the interaction between language and memory. Journal of Verbal Learning & Verbal Behavior, 13, 585-589. Loftus, E. F., Miller, D. G., Burns, H. J. (1978). Semantic integration of verbal information into a visual memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 4, 19-31. Nicolas, S., Collins, Th., Gounden, Y., & Roediger, H. (2011a). Natural suggestibility in children: A translation of Binet & Henri (1894) pioneer paper. Consciousness and Cognition, 20, 394-398.

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Nicolas, S., Collins, Th., Gounden, Y., & Roediger, H. (2011b). The influence of suggestibility on memory. Consciousness and Cognition, 20, 399-400. Roediger, H. L. (1996). Memory illusions. Journal of Memory and Language, 35, 76100. Roediger, H. L., Meade, M., & Bergman, E. T. (2001). Social contagion of memory. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 8, 365-371. Siegler, R. S. (1992). The other Alfred Binet. Developmental Psychology, 28, 179190. Stern, L. W. (Ed.) (1903-1904). Beiträge zur Psychology der Aussage [Contributions on the psychology of testimony]. Leipzig: Bath. Stern, L. W. (1939). The psychology of testimony. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 34, 3-20. Wolf, T.H. (1973). Alfred Binet. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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IMITATION1 Alfred BINET (1900)

In listing imitation as one of the principal forms of suggestibility, I did not draw my inspiration from theoretical ideas so often presented in recent years on the mechanism of imitation, its laws, and its philosophy: it is quite rare for theoretical ideas to provide a practical outlet into experimentation, and those who seek to perfect their experimental results stand to gain little from leafing through the writings of those who work beyond the sphere of experimentation and observation. 2 My only guide consisted in those everyday facts and observations which show us that minds without originality obsequiously copy all the eccentricities of fashion, and that individuals who have difficulty forming their own opinion assimilate in good faith the judgments of their newspaper. It thus seemed to me incontestable that while imitation, if kept restrained within certain limits, is a social necessity, it can, when taken to excess, become a sign of servility or of weak-mindedness. I wandered a long while before I found an experimental formula for work on imitation. At the very outset, I had imagined that by having children copy letters that are differently decorated and traced, it would be possible to distinguish those who interpret the model following the habits of their own handwriting from those who copy it in a servile, automatic fashion. This attempt, although pursued at some length, brought me only doubtful results; children of well-established suggestibility did not prove to be servile copyists of my handwriting samples, as I was expecting; and the youngest children, who in general are highly suggestible, preferred to reproduce specimens of their personal handwriting. Are they thus less inclined to imitation than their elders? I do not think so; but the tendency toward imitation does not manifest itself indistinguishably in all circumstances; it can be suspended by other influences. It is quite obvious that ease of execution is one of the essential elements of success; imitation is only undertaken when imitation does not require painful effort, which breaks with our habits. It is no doubt for this reason that a child given an ornamented capital letter to copy more willingly traces the capital letters he is used to writing, preferring to take the path of least effort. It is thus necessary, from this point of view, to distinguish two kinds of imitations: easy imitations and difficult imitations. The former do not demand a great effort of attention, not requiring the abandonment of an already acquired habit. Most social imitations demand minimal effort, and if we wish to search for examples of experiments that can succeed, we must seek them in this category. Thus, I can give the following example, borrowed from my personal experiences: draw a circle in front of someone, and request that they draw in turn a second circle on the same page whose distance from the first, counted from one circumference to the other, is 5 centimeters; most often, nineteen times out of twenty, the second circle will be, by imitation, about the same size as the first; if we perform the experiment a second time with a circle of a different size, we see the subject conform once again to the model 1

In Binet, A. (1900). Imitation. In A. Binet, La suggestibilité (pp. 330-359). Paris: Schleicher. We wish to thank Paul Reeve for the translation and Michael Goode for his help. [Editor’s note] 2 I have nonetheless sampled the very fine pages written on this subject by Baldwin, Interprétation des faits sociaux, p. 223 et seq

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that he has before his eyes, enlarging or shrinking his circle as the case may be, without suspecting that he is undergoing the phenomenon of imitation. Imitation occurs so reliably because it encounters no resistance: the view of the circle that has already been traced provides the subject with an image of a circle at the moment when he is being asked to trace a second circle; this image is not contradicted by any other, awakens no critical thought, and presents no special difficulty in its imitation; there is thus no reason for it not to guide the movement of the hand and to become a directing image. It follows from this first attempt and from the reflections that flowed from it that in order to perform experiments on imitation, one must address the category of easy imitations. But would this be enough? Can all easy imitations lead to a study of individual psychology? In avoiding a pitfall, we fall into another pitfall; to avoid experiments that almost never succeed, we will end up performing others that will succeed too often. If the imitation whose consequences we wish to study is such an easy act that we can be sure of its execution in advance, it will teach us nothing about the intellectual and moral character of people: if all those who are told to draw a second circle draw one that is equal or roughly equal to a first circle that is presented to them, we will not learn which individuals are imitators and which are not. Irresistible imitation thus also cannot serve as a test for individual psychology. I took the experiments on questioning that I had just performed and I modified them a little so that I could investigate imitation. Instead of questioning an isolated pupil on one of the objects that I had just shown him, I interrogated three pupils brought together in the same room, undergoing the experiment jointly; the response of whoever speaks first necessarily influences the two others; they can either reject this response and perform an act of judgment themselves, or save themselves this small effort and repeat their classmate's response. The experiments were performed on pupils in the middle course in one school and those in the upper-level course in another school; 24 pupils took part in these experiments. None of them was known to me; I was seeing them for the first time; they came into the principal's office in groups of three. I started by telling them that we were going to perform a memory exercise together. I then gave them the usual instructions on the card I was going to show them, the very short time during which it would remain visible, and the questions that would be posed to them; I had all three of them sit at the same table, and I gave them the following explanation: ―Here is a sheet of paper with various questions written on it about the objects that you are going to look at. One of you will act as president 1 and will read each of the questions aloud; you will need to think carefully, and then you will give your best response to the question that has been posed to. The sheet of paper is divided into three columns: you will write each of your names and ages at the top of a column, and each one’s responses must be written in his own column. To save time, only one of you, the one I call the president, must hold the pen and write not only his own responses, but also those of the two others; he will pass them the pen only if the questionnaire asks for a drawing; in this case, each one will take the pen to make the requested drawing himself. One more thing: once you have heard the question, you will think for a moment, and then you will respond out loud; it is very likely that you will not all answer at the same time; some will answer quickly, others more slowly; I want the order of the answers to be written down on the paper with a number; you will write 1

In a preliminary study, I held the pen myself; but I noticed that my presence removed a great deal of the students' mental freedom, and I preferred to leave them alone without getting involved in the discussions that they might have. I think that t he best method would be to give the role of president to a pupil who would not himself take part in the experiment.

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the number down with the responses; whoever answers first will receive the number 1, the second the number 2, and so on. Is this understood? Good. Now I will show you the card.‖ This explanation, which I sometimes repeated when it had not been completely understood, sufficed to indicate each pupil's role clearly. The card was shown separately to each pupil for twelve seconds; this card depicted the objects that I described above. As might have been expected, the children tested in groups were generally less serious than isolated children. Never, during experiments as long and painstaking as those I have just described, did an isolated child laugh; in collective experiments with three children at a time, laughter broke out often; in two cases, it took on such proportions that the principal thought it necessary to speak sternly to the laughing children. What is more, each group of children had its own special traits; I noted very serious groups, wherein the children never even smiled; in other groups, the children maintained their composure until they arrived at certain questions, which set off uncontrollable fits of laughter; for example the question ―What is the shape of the hat that the man has on his head?‖—This question includes, it seems, a comical element that almost never fails to work its effects; the drawings, generally clumsy and ridiculous, that the children executed in answer to certain questions, also often set the children laughing.1 As a result of these dispositions, the children did not pay nearly as much attention to the written questions as when they were isolated; certainly they paid less attention, and they felt less keenly responsible for what they wrote. This is, of course, nothing but a personal impression; I can demonstrate it only by the pupils’ attitude, which was more distracted than during experiments with individual children. It also seemed to me that the pupils in the same group were much more concerned with their own responses than with those of their classmates; I never heard the least discussion of the correctness of another's answer: none of them showed any interest in correcting error; in other words, the groups formed for the experiment did not have the time or the opportunity to produce an esprit de corps, or solidarity. We might have been able to give such solidarity a chance to manifest itself if we had taken a few special precautions: if for example we had arranged for the pupils in a group to pursue the same goal, to create a common interest; also I suppose that if we had informed the pupils that the group which had given the most correct responses would receive a reward, it is possible that the pupils would have taken an interest in the answers of their fellow group members, and that we would have seen the emergence of discussions on the correctness of certain answers. This study is worth carrying out; in the present case, we made no effort to link the pupils in a group together with any sort of solidarity, and they all behaved in a manner that seemed to me to be entirely independent, applying only the principle of every man for himself. Here are the more or less social sentiments which seemed to me to emerge during this experiment, and which I noted as I saw them. The desire of most of the children seemed to be to answer first; this is no doubt a habit that comes out of collective responses in class. In order to answer first, a child must answer quickly, and the result was that many of the children did not take the time to think, a circumstance that must certainly have contributed to increasing their suggestibility. Short discussions often arose about which of the classmates had answered first, which proves to us how much each of them prized the rank he had attained in the contest for speed. The child who acted as president was charged with 1

These studies would provide a good method for the study of the psychology of laughter—a study that remains to be performed, since the question has thus far been dealt with only theoretically.

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writing down not only the children's answers, but their order, and I owe it to truth to observe that the president was not always impartial; when another child answered at the same time as him, or even a little before him, he often committed the small act of treachery of considering himself as having answered first. It is incontestable, as we will see in detail shortly, that the first answers spread contagiously to the slower children: but it seems that this contagion was never voluntary; the children who answered first found themselves to be leaders without having sought this role. A pattern that seemed extremely frequent was that of submissive imitation; very often, as soon as any response had been given, it was accepted by the other children without any criticism, or with a totally insignificant modification that took away none of the answer's imitative character. Another thing that happened, although more rarely, was that certain children did not want to give their opinion, out of fear of enlightening their classmates; one of them always waited for the other answers to be written before giving his own. He did not want the others to copy his answer. The children's attitude throughout the duration of the experiment was remarkably constant: those who answered first or last were almost always the same. Below we give the list of our pupils, with the indication of the order in which they answered.

CHILDREN HAVING ALMOST ALWAYS ANSWERED FIRST NUMBER OF TIMES THAT THEY ANSWERED Pupils. J. M. N. B. P. B.J. Mean

First. 13 10 8 9 9 8 ___ 9.5

Second. 0 4 1 4 4 4 ___ 3

Last. 0 1 2 2 2 3 ___ 2

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CHILDREN HAVING ALMOST ALWAYS ANSWERED SECOND NUMBER OF TIMES THAT THEY ANSWERED Pupils P. T. N. R. B. U.

First. 0 4 3 5 6 3 ___ 3.5

Mean

Second. 11 5 7 5 8 8 ___ 7

Last. 2 5 2 6 1 3 ___ 3

CHILDREN HAVING ALMOST ALWAYS ANSWERED LAST NUMBER OF TIMES THAT THEY ANSWERED Pupil

First.

s C. Col. T. U. F. G. Mean

0 2 0 2 1 2 ___ 1

Seco nd. 2 6 4 5 4 3 ___ 4

Last. 11 8 7 8 10 10 ___ 8

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A 1. Colour of the thread holding the button in place. 2. Place damaged.

where

the

button

B

C

A

B

C

Grey1

Beige3

A

B

C

0

Beige2

Black1

Chestnu t3

3rd group

A

B

C

Imitations

Questions

2nd group

Imitations

1st group

Imitations

Imitations

Table XVIII.– Experiment on group interaction

0

Grey1

Yellow3

White2

0

4th group

Black2

Grey3

Grey1

1

Chestnu t [redbrown]2

On the side2

On the side2

On the side1

2

On the right3

At the top2

On the right1

1

In the middle3

On the edge1

On the edge2

1

At the top1

On the right2

On the right3

1

Dark brown3

Dark brown1

Dark brown2

>>

Dark blue3

Dark brown1

Brown2

>>

Dark blue3

Dark brown2

Dark brown1

>>

Dark brown1

Light red2

Dark brown3

>>

Left leg3

Left leg1

Left leg2

>>

Left leg3

Right1

Left2

>>

Right leg2

Left leg3

Left leg1

>>

Left leg1

Left leg2

Left leg3

>>

There is none2

1

He doesn’t have one1

He doesn’t have one2

He doesn’t have one3

2

Small book2

0

A notebook

A booklet2

A booklet3

2

is

3. Color of the portrait.

4. One leg crossed over the other.

5. Shape of the hat. 3

Top hat

Round

A crown3

Newspa per1

11. Clothing of the person who was stopped.

12. Seventh object.

13. Eighth object.

Flat

0

Top hat

0

Cane1

2

1

Top hat

Top hat

Umbrell a3

Cane2

At the bottom3 At the right

At the top2 At the top

On the right1 At the top

In the middle3

On the left2

Left side

Left side

Left side

2

Paris

Vaugira rd

Paris

1

Austria

Paris

At the top3

At the top2

At the top1

2

At the top3

In front of the man2

In the crowd3

Behind the man1

1

Beside the man2

In black3

In black2

In black1

2

A postal depot3

A postal depot 1

A postal depot 2

2

There isn’t one2

There isn’t one1

There isn’t one3

2

9. Thread holding the label in place.

10. The dog.

2

A feather( pen)2 On the left1

6. Object held in the hand.

7. Place where the coin has a hole in it. 8. Postage stamp.

1

1

2

Flat

There is none1

1

A cane3

Nothing

3

1

At the right3 At the right1

In the middle1 At the right2

Paris1

Paris

2 points at the top Corner on the left1

2 points at the top Beside the grate2

0

At the right2

1

At the right3

Paris

1

Lille

At the top2

?1

1

Line at the top

Near the door1

On the left3

0

Corner on the right3

In beige1

In grey3

0

Long shirt3

Photogr aph2

There isn’t one1

Photogr aph3

1

I don’t know

I don’t know

A man2

A person1

A woman3

0

I don’t know

I don’t know

In chestnut 2

16

3

8

Black vest1

1

1

At the head1

At the head2

At the head3

2

2

---

---

---

>>

1

---

---

---

>>

1

At the bottom1

At the bottom2

Across3

1

0

On the right1

Toward the middle on the right3

Toward the middle1

1

0

White jacket and grey pants1

White jacket and grey pants2

Topcoat and grey pants3

2

I don’t know

2

A dog1

A dog2

A dog3

2

I don’t know

2

Dog1

Dog2

Dog3

2

Black overcoat 2

11

15

69

2

Black2

White3

Chestn ut1

On the side.1

1

At the top1

?2

Dark brown1

There’s a side that’s a bit light.2

>>

Brown1

Left leg.2

Right leg.1

Right leg.3

>>

Split, dark grey1

Soft, dark grey.2

Split, dark grey.3

2

6. Object held in the hand.

Glove.3

Glove2

Glove1

2

7. Place where the coin has a hole in it. 8. Postage stamp.

In the top.3

In the top.2

In the top.1

2

1. Colour of the thread holding the button in place. 2. Place where the button is damaged.

C

Grey thread3

Grey thread1

Dark grey2

On the side – a little light.2

At the top.3

The right side is darker.3

3. Color of the portrait.

4. One leg crossed over the other.

A

B

C

No. of successful suggestions

C

B

Total number of imitations

B

A

1

Red.

Grey.

Red.

1

5

24

At left almost on the bottom.

2

Toward the holes.

Towar d the holes.

?

1

9

22

Brown

Dark brown.

>>

Dark brown

Dark brown

Dark brown

>>

>>

22

Left leg

Left leg

Nothing

>>

Left leg

Left leg

Left leg

>>

>>

23

1

Round

Round

Round

2

Top hat

Top hat

Round

1

11

19

0

Cane

Cane

1

Nothing

Napkin

Napkin

1

7

22

0

At the top

On the head ——

2

9

24

>>

On the head ——

5

>>

7th group

Imitations

A

Questions

Imitations

6th group

Imitations

5th group

Imitations

Table XVIII (cont’d.)– Experiment on group interaction

A

B

C

0

Grey.

Grey.

White.

In the middle3

>>

Left almost on the bottom.

At left almost on the bottom.

Dark blue3

Dark blue2

>>

Brown

Left leg.2

Right leg3

Right leg1

>>

Cap3

Top hat2

Top hat1

A watch2 On the right2

Cap3

A book1 At the botom1

8th group

5. Shape of the hat.

>>

Paris3 9. Thread holding the label in place.

On the left3

Paris2

At the top

10. The dog. 3

In the middle

Paris1

In the middle

At the top

On the right in the bottom1

On the right in the bottom2

12. Seventh object. 13. Eighth object.

The crowd Don’t remember

In black1

Dark grey3

A yawning man Don’t remember

Don’t remember Don’t remember

>>

On the head ——

1

French1

English 3

1

——

——

——

>>

Paris

Paris

Paris

2

8

>>

1

Square in the middle2

Square in the middle3

Square in the middle1

1

At the top

In the middle

At the top

1

——

——

——

>>

8

>>

1

In the middle1

At the left2

0

On the left, at the bottom.

On the left, not totally.

1

In the courtyard , at the bottom

In the corner, at the bottom

In the corner, at the bottom

2

6

24

2

Grey trousers, white shirt, no hat.

Grey trousers, white shirt, no hat.

At the bottom in the middle Grey trousers, white shirt, no hat.

2

Black

Black

Black

2

11

24

1

Nothing

Nothing

Nothing

2

Print

Print

Print

2

12

16

Building

Buildin g

Building

2

13

12

At the bottom 3

11. Clothing of the person who was stopped. In black2

In the middle ——

2

2

French

——

Handkerc hief In the middle ——

1

Black3

Black1

Black2

0

Buildin g3

Buildin g2

Church

2 16

Grate

2nd coin

1

2nd coin

1 7

Nothing

Nothing

Nothing

2 15

16

70

71

These data3 show us that in becoming part of a group, each of the children maintains his way of reacting, or rather adopts a way of reacting that remains constant throughout the experiment; one of them takes on the habit of always responding first, this is the leader of the group, who imposes his answer most often on the others; our data prove that these leaders sometimes came second, and more rarely last. Similarly, certain children took on the habit of responding after all their classmates; sometimes they came second, and much more rarely first. The characteristics presented by the group of those who come second are less clear-cut, as these subjects often came first and often came last. These numerical results are clearly very interesting, despite their ―sécheresse‖ they show us that children who form a single group take up a position within it, a definite function, which they then conserve; the group organizes itself, and a hierarchy is established. From this brief description it can already be concluded that these children organized into groups present a certain number of feelings and attitudes that stem from their grouping, and which rightfully belong to the study known as crowd psychology; but it is incontestable, on the other hand, that many of these feelings are strongly influenced by the habits of school life; for example, the desire to be the first to answer comes from the emulation that is cultivated in schoolchildren through the use of compositions and collective questioning. After this overview, let us look into certain details. All of these experimental results are reproduced in Table XVIII; in the 1st column at the left of this table are given the written questions that the children read, to which they had to respond in writing. Next, with respect to each question, we placed the children’s answers in the following columns, preserving the children's grouping into threes in the table; after each group is a column which gives the number of imitations. These imitations are in any case very simple to calculate; with 3 children in each group, there can be no more than 2 imitations; this is what happens when the three children give the same answer; it is also possible for there to be no imitation. Above each answer from a child, we indicate the order in which he responded with an exponent, at least when this order is known; it was not indicated for the children in groups 7 and 8. Every response which is an imitation is printed in italics; in case of doubt on the nature of a response, italics were also used. In interpreting these results, there are two principal facts that take on great importance: first, the children's suggestibility, and second, their tendency toward imitation. The suggestibility of schoolchildren in groups.—In conceiving this collective experiment, I had supposed that a group of children working together and judging together memories that they held in common together would become thanks to this collaboration less suggestible than individual children; I had supposed that this bringing together of three intelligences would sharpen the critical spirit displayed in the responses, and also would dissipate the emotion of timidity which is one of the most important parts of childhood suggestibility. The results proved me completely wrong. The openness to suggestion of individual children asked to respond to questionnaire number three in the face of Translator’s note: EXPLANATION OF (1), (2), (3), AND THE ANSWERS IN ITALICS : ―Above each student's answer, we indicate his place in the order of responses with an exponent, at least when this order is known; it was not indicated for the pupils in groups 7 and 8. Every response which is an imitation is printed in italics; in case of doubt on the nature of a response, italics were also used.‖ 3

72

suggestion led to them succumbing to suggestion on 8 out of 13 questions; such that if the children working in groups of 3 had a degree of suggestibility analogous to that of the isolated children, they too should have succumbed to 8 suggestions on average. Here are the actual results. 6 children yielded to. . . . . . 9 ———— . . . . . . 6 ———— . . . . . . 3 ———— . . . . . . 0 ———— less than .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

13 suggestions out of 13 12 ———— 11 ———— 10 ———— 10 ————

The mean that can be extracted from these figures yields roughly 1 resistance out of 13 suggestions per student. Thus, while an individual child obeys 8 suggestions out of 13, a child of the same age, responding to exactly the same question, but doing so collectively, obeys 12 out of 13 suggestions. This difference in suggestibility is considerable, and is expressed not only by the mean, but by the series of individual values, since none of the subjects who was working collectively was able to resist more than three times. Consequently, even though our research was conducted on a fairly small scale, including only 24 subjects, it yielded a result which seems to me so significant that I believe it to be exact and constant. The final column of Table XVIII indicates the total number of successful suggestions for the various questions; the maximum possible number of suggestions is 24 for each suggestion, as 24 is the number of children; it can be seen that this number was almost always reached; a genuinely smaller figure of effective suggestions is found only for the last questions, which are very vague, and relate to the existence of the 7th and 8th objects. We saw in the last chapter that the individual subject is also more resistant to these last suggestions than to the others, and we explained therein the reason for this fact. I believe that the increase in suggestibility produced by collective experiments derives from the fact that the schoolchildren, finding themselves in a group, were less disciplined than the individual children, and laughed more readily, and consequently they were less attentive as they carried out the work. This collective experiment, in the particular conditions under which I organized it, produced two distinct effects, in my opinion; of these two effects, one weakens suggestion, and the other reinforces it; the first effect is to reduce discipline and attention, which is what augments suggestion; the second effect is to reduce the children's shyness; they are more daring, and by virtue of this less suggestible; but the results show that of these two tendencies acting in opposite directions, it is the first that won out over the second. We have just seen that the first characteristic of our group experiment is an increase in suggestibility. It is curious indeed to find, here in this small group of schoolchildren, one of the characteristics that modern authors take to sum up the psychology of crowds. The crowd, it has been said and repeated in countless ways, be it a crowd in the street or at a meeting, is eminently suggestible, leading to political and social consequences of exceptional gravity. The contagion of the example among schoolchildren in a group.—The second characteristic of this group experiment is the contagion of the example; by virtue of the fact that the children are brought together and give their answers to the questions out loud, they are led to give similar responses; he who answers second tends to

73

repeat the answer of the first, and the third does the same. This imitation is seen in more than half of all cases. To go into more detail, certain difficulties must be faced. We must first set aside questions that pose a dilemma: for example, the following question: ―Does the man in the portrait have his right leg crossed over his left leg, or his left leg crossed over his right leg?‖ Or this one: ―Is the portrait dark brown or dark blue?‖ The child taken by suggestion is obliged to choose between these two alternatives; if three children in the same group designate the same leg or the same color, this can without a doubt be the effect of imitation, but it can also be a fortuitous coincidence, since the number of possible variations in responses is very limited. It is preferable to leave the interpretation of these answers open, and not count them as cases of imitation. After the elimination of these dubious cases, we must distinguish between two types of imitations: 1st: literal imitation, often naïve in its fidelity, and about the nature of which no doubt can arise; 2nd: imitation accompanied by certain secondary variations. Literal imitation is fairly frequent. Here are some examples. Three children, wanting to describe the clothing of the (imaginary) individual who is stopped by the agents, write the same answer word for word: ―White shirt, grey trousers, he didn't have a hat.‖—Similarly, three children write that the (imaginary) dog was placed in the corner at the bottom—or that the crack in the coin is located on the left almost at the bottom; or again, they execute three identical drawings of the thread that holds the label, or of the placement of the postmark on the stamp. In Figure 26 we give example of literal imitations in drawings. Here now are some examples of semi-imitations. When asked ―Where is the dog?‖ one of the children answers: ―In front of the man‖; another then answers: ―Behind the man.‖ It is evident that the first answer influenced the second, since no one in the other groups of children answered in this way. —Similarly, asked ―How is the (imaginary) individual who has been stopped by the agents dressed?‖, one answers ―In black‖; the second, ―In black‖; the third ―In dark grey.‖ It is probable that this dark grey is nothing but a variant on the response "in black". Similarly, for the color of the thread holding the button in place, we have the three answers: ―Grey thread, grey thread, dark grey thread‖; this half-correction on a shade of grey does not eliminate the suspicion that the child who gave this last answer had imitated the answers of his classmates. Other cases are a little more doubtful; asked what the man in the portrait is holding in his right hand, two children answer ―a booklet‖a; the third answers ―a notebook.‖b This is more or less the same thing, only the word differs. We have sometimes been obliged to interpret the responses to calculate the number of imitations; but as these interpretations bear only on a very small number of doubtful cases, they cannot modify the certainty of our conclusions. Thus, as can be seen in the second to last column of Table XVIII, the number of imitations was considerable; the maximum number would have been 16 for each question, for understandable reasons; the maximum number is two per group of three children, and, the number of groups being 8, this maximum number for all the groups combined is 16. Thus, setting aside questions three and four, for which the number of imitations cannot be calculated, we observe that for the other questions the number of imitations is equal to about half of all cases. Imitation is thus much weaker than suggestibility; in other words, children who succumb to suggestion do not always give in to the imitation of their a b

un livret un carnet

74

classmates—they can allow themselves to be influenced by suggestion even while giving a personal answer: half of the children did so. But it is evident that this proportion is linked to a host of circumstances that are specific to this experiment, and that it should not be treated as a law. Moreover, we may notice a fact that is in a way the opposite of this one; it is that several children can imitate each other while resisting the effect of suggestion; I do not doubt that when, for the seventh and eighth objects, the members of certain groups answered that there was none, they did so by imitation; imitation can thus protect them from suggestion.

Fig. 26.—Examples of drawings made under the influence of imitation. The 3 drawings executed by children in the same group are in the same row. Drawings 1 and 2 represent the (imaginary) hat worn by the person in the portrait; 3 and 4 represent the stamp with its (imaginary) postmark; 5 is the drawing of the seventh object (which did not exist). In summary, this little experiment on group psychology—the first, to my knowledge, to have been attempted along these lines—has revealed three important facts: 1st. The children, having been grouped together randomly, showed no sense of solidarity, each answering for himself, and each seeking to be the first to answer; 2nd. By the simple fact of being grouped together, the children became more suggestible, and this increase in suggestibility resulted from complex causes: the desire to answer quickly, the tendency toward fits of laughter, etc.; 3rd. Many children imitated the answers of other children. This contagion of the example constitutes one of the most marked characteristics of the psychology of groups.

75

These facts are the most apparent when looking at this experiment from a distance, and when we limit ourselves to extracting the conclusions that are implied by the mean results. It is worth extending this first study with a closer examination of how each group behaved and an analysis of the role played by each child. It becomes apparent from this exercise that almost every group has its own particular traits. NEW EXPERIMENTS ON SCHOOLCHILDREN BROUGHT TOGETHER IN GROUPS We performed this new study, repeating the same experiment with new objects, on our usual 24 pupils from the elementary school. Here we have the advantage of observing children that we are already acquainted with. Here is the list of the objects with a few brief details on each of them: 1 to 3.—3 French stamps, with values of 1 cent (blue)—2 cents (brown)—and 5 cents (green); all three stamps were new. Underneath the stamps, the number 8 was printed in green. 4.—A round section cut out from a printed text, carrying the words: ―Mrs. Cremer, while laughing ... came in effect to reproduce ... Lorenz ... imitated me. I don't ... at work! really! ... very embarrassed and ashamed! ... if that isn't enough... to put on a brave face... by his presence.‖ c 5.—A photograph from a cinematograph depicting a gardener who is emptying a pail of water. 6.—Another photograph depicting two wrestlers. 7.—Another photograph depicting a little girl who is jumping rope. 8.—A piece of blotting paper, pinkish, splattered, more or less rectangular in shape. 9.—A fragment of tape measure, brown, made of leather, bearing the numbers 37 to 42. 10.—A cloth button, garnet-colored [deep red]. All of these objects were glued to a piece of cardboard, which was presented to each child for 12 seconds. The written questionnaire which was communicated to each group of children was the following: 1. How many stamps are there? 2. What color are they? 3. Which one bears the postmark? 4. What is the name of the city that can be seen on the postmark? 5. What is the shape of the piece of blotting paper? 6. What is the word that is written on this blotting paper? 7. Is the print representing a little girl who is jumping rope dark blue or brown? 8. Who is the person standing beside the little girl? 9. What weapons are the two men who are fighting holding in their hands? 10. In the left corner there is a picture that depicts the Seine river. What detail did you notice in this picture? 11. What is the color of the cloth button? 12. What are the numbers written on the bit of measuring tape?

c

Translator’s footnote: this passage, being made up of more or less incoherent fragments, is necessarily approximate. The original French text is as follows: ―Mme Cremer en riant ... venu en effet à reproduire ... Lorenz m'a... imité. Je ne ... à l'oeuvre! vraiment! ... très ennuyé et honteux! ... si cela ne suffit... à faire à mauvais jeu... par sa présence.‖

76

13. On the paper circle, there is a sentence beginning with this is why. What are the words that follow? This list was presented to the child who had the role of president, and he read it to his classmates, question by question; they all answered each question before moving on to the next. In this experiment, the pupils were much more serious than their classmates from the same school or pupils from another school who took part in the first experiment on imitation, described above. The difference in attitude was very striking; I never had to make any remarks or reprimands, and there were no fits of laughter whatsoever. I attribute the children's docility to our earlier exchanges, in the course of which I had accustomed them to discipline. The results are presented in Table XIX, where the original answers are in bold characters and the imitative answers are in italics. I will not discuss the results collectively, as I have already performed such a 1 study ; I wish on the contrary to examine the work of each child, and establish whether the results of the present experiment agree with those that we have already. To characterize the role of each child, we must take several variables into account: 1st. The rank of the child responding to the questions; had he often been the first to answer, or always the last? To determine this rank, it is necessary to recall that each child is examined in relation to the other children who form the same group; and the rank he obtained has no absolute value, but only a value relative to this group; thus, it is quite possible that a child who on average was 3rd in the group he was in would have been 1st in a group made up of slower children. This point about rank is equally true of all the other results obtained in this experiment. 2nd. The number of times that the child repeated a classmate's answer, compared to the number of times he gave an original answer, of his own invention. In general, those who most often gave an original answer were the quickest, those who answered first; but sometimes the child who spoke 3rd, or last, gave an answer that was entirely different from those of the others.

1

Let me simply note that in this experiment, contrary to the previous one, imitation was much stronger than the original suggestibility, which becomes apparent with a look at the answers to questions which include suggestion, notably questions 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 10, and 13.

77

1st group

Questions VASSE. 1. Number of stamps. 2. Color of stamps. 3. Which stamp bears the postmark? 4. Name of the city printed on the postmark. 5. Shape of the blotting paper. 6. Words written on the blotting paper. 7. Is the print dark blue or brown?

PET.

31 32 Garnet Garnet, [dark red], green, green, 1 2 dark blue dark grey

2nd group

DEW.

GESB.

POIRE

LAC.

BIEN.

FEL.

MART.

MOTE.

33

34

31

32

33

34

35

Green, garnet, blue4

Green, garnet, blue3

35 Green, garnet, dark yellow5

Red, chestnut, blue1

Red, chestnut, green2

Red, chestnut, green3

Red, chestnut, purple5

Red, green, chestnut4

Red1

Red5

Blue4

Paris1

Paris4

Paris5

Rectang.2

Rectang.4

Rectang.5

Not4

Not3

Green2

Green1

Not5

O.1

O.2

O.3

O.4

O.5

Rectang.

Rectang.

Rectang.

Rectang.

Rectang.

O.

O.

O.

O.

O.

Rien

Rien

France1

Rien

Rien

Brown4

Brown3

Brown2

Brown1

Brown5

Brown2

Brown1

Brown3

Brown4

Brown5

8. Person near the little girl.

Lady4

Lady3

Lady2

Lady1

Lady5

9. Weapons of the wrestlers.

Nothing5

Nothing4

Gloves1

Gloves2

Gloves3

O.

O.

O.

O.

O.

Garnet2

Garnet1

Red3

12. Numbers on the measuring tape.

Prussian blue5 37 to 423

37 to 421

37 to 424

13. Words placed after: this is why.

O.

O.

Number of imitations.

9.5

Number of original answers. Number of correct original answers.

10. What detail in the photograph of the Seine? 11. Color of the cloth button.

Child’s average rank.

Chestnut3 Chestnut2 Paris2

Paris3

Rectang.3 Rectang. 1

Gentleman3 Gentleman2

Gentleman 1

Boxing gloves4 Yes3 Nothing2

Boxing gloves2 Yes2 Boat1

Nothing1

Red4

Garnet3

37 to 452

37 to 425

O.

O.

9

11

3.5

4

1.5 3

Gentleman4 Gentleman5

Yes1 Boat4

Boxing gloves3 Yes4 Boat3

Boxing gloves3 Yes5 Boat5

Red2

Red1

Red4

Chestnut5

37 to 412

38 to 411

38 to 423

37 to 414

37 to 415

O.

O.3

O.2

O.1

O.4

O.5

9

12.5

9.5

7.5

5.5

13.5

12

2

4

0.5

4.5

6.5

8.5

0.5

1

4

1

1

0

4.5

1

3.5

0.5

1

2

2

3.5

5

2.5

2

2

4

5

78

Questions

3rd group MONNE. 3

BOUT. 2

DELAUS. 5

BLAS. 1

3 Orangecolored, green, blue4 Green4

4 Green, blue, orangecolored3 Green3

République française.4

République française.3

Rectang.4 There are none4. Brown5

Rectang.3 There are none3. Brown4

A man.5 Feet, hands, gloves5

A man.4

A man.2

A man.1

Gloves4

Gloves2

10.

Boat1

Boat3

11.

Garnet5

12.

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

13. Number of imitations. Number of original answers. Number of correct original answers. Child’s average rank.

3

4th group SAGA. 3

3 3 Green, blue, Green, blue, Green, red, orangeorange2 blue colored1 colored5 Red2 Blue1 Green5 République française and République City of française.2 Paris.1 City of Paris.5 Rectang.1 Rectang.2 Rectang.5 There are There are There are none1. none2. none5. Brown2 Brown1 Brown3

VAND. 2

UHL 4

AND.

MERIG. 14

2

3

Blue and green2

Blue, green, and red3

Blue, green, yellow4

Yellow1

Green1

Red2

White4

Yellow3

City of Paris1

3

1

City of Paris3 City of Paris4

France2

Rectang.3

Rectang. 1

Rectang.4

Rectang.2

Blotter1

Blotter2

Blotter4

Blotter3

Blue2

Dark1

Dark4

Brown3

A man.3

Lady.2

Lady.3

Lady.4

Lady.1

Their feet.1

The feet.3

Épée2

Épée4

Sabre3

Sabre1

Parisian boat5

Boat2

Boat4

Bridge1

Bridge2

Bridge4

Round3

Garnet3

Garnet2

Garnet1

Garnet4

Black1

Red3

Red4

7 to 112

47 to 524

47 to 525

47 to 521

47 to 523

38 to 423

38 to 421

37 to 424

Orangecolored2 40 to 452

Don’t know5

Don’t know4

Verb to kill3

Kill2

Kill4

Kill1

11

11

7

3

13

4

7.5

10.5

2

2

2

6

10

0

9

5.5

2.5

11

0

0

2.5

5

0

0

4

1.5

1

3

2.5

2

1

4

2

2.5

4

2

Don’t know3 Don’t know1 Don’t know2

79

Questions

5th group TIX.

GOUJ.

1

HUB.

2. 3.

3 Green, red, blue1 Blue3

3 Green, red, blue3 Blue4

35 Green, red, blue5 Blue5

4.

Paris4.

Paris2.

Paris1.

Paris3.

Paris5.

5.

Rectang.4

Rectang.2

Rectang.1

Rectang.3

Rectang.5

6.

Blotter4.

Blotter2.

Blotter3.

Blotter1.

Blotter5.

7.

Brown4

Brown3

Brown2

Dark blue1

Brown5

8.

Lady.5

Car.3

Lady.2

Lady.1

Lady.4

9.

Nothing4

Nothing2

Nothing1

Nothing3

Nothing5

10.

Boat5

Boat4

The water3

The water1

The water2

11.

Red4

Dark red3

Chestnut1

Red2

Dark red5

12.

16 to 195 I don’t want to give it back to you3

12 to 162

1 to 631

I want it2

I want it5

11

8

7

5

12

2

5

6

8

1

0

0

4

2

0

4

2.5

2.5

2

5

Number of imitations. Number of original answers. Number of correct original answers. Child’s average rank.

4

DIE.

3 Green, red, blue2 Blue1

13.

2

MIEN.

3 Green, red, blue4 Red2

1.

5

13 to 144 1 to 61 I don’t want I don’t want to give it to give it back to you1 back to you4

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3rd. The number of times that the child gave a correct answer. Here, a distinction is necessary. A child can give a correct answer either by inventing it himself or by contenting himself with repeating the correct answer of a classmate; in the latter case, the child cannot be credited with the merit of his answer's correctness, since it was but an echo. Consequently, I will only count correct answers which are original. 1st group.—It was made up of the pupils Vas., Pet., Gesb., Dew. and Poire, who are all from the 1st class. d The first four of these, according to our earlier tests, are of middling suggestibility, with no very marked traits; the last, on the contrary, Poire, is well known to us for his deep suggestibility; we have always presented him as a kind of automaton. In this group, the pupils imitated one another a great deal; answers by imitation were always much more numerous than answers by invention. There was no particular leader, it seemed, answering first more than the others, and having suggested answers more often than he imitated them. The child who gave the most correct and original answers is Pet.; but he too was strongly subject to the urge to imitate the others. What is striking is the discreet role played by Poire. He always, so to speak, answered last, and he only ever opened his mouth to repeat what the preceding classmate had said. Once only, he gave an original answer, and it was an error; the others varied somewhat on the colour of the 3 stamps; they had said: grenat (dark red), green, dark grey; or: grenat, green, dark blue. Both of these answers were correct, as one of the stamps has a shade that can be called either grey or blue. Seeking to innovate, Poire said: grenat, green, dark yellow; this was the only time that he distinguished himself with a personal opinion: but there was no dark yellow stamp. This new test thus confirms what we already knew about this child. Thus, in this group, there were 4 equal children and 1 automaton. 2nd group.—This group was formed by pupils from the 1st and 2nd classes. Three pupils from the 1st class: Monne, an average pupil who presents no particular distinguishing traits; Delanse, an older pupil (over 14), adult-looking, with low suggestibility; and finally Bout., younger, one of our three completely suggestible subjects. The two pupils from the 2nd class are Blasch and Sag., two very intelligent children, hard workers, who are at the head of the 2nd class, and who are in perpetual rivalry; this rivalry is so serious that it has spread to the families of the two pupils and rendered them hostile to one another. At the outset, it was difficult to predict the results of this grouping; I supposed only that Delanse, because of his age and low suggestibility, would lead, and that Bout. would act as a perfect automaton, a little like Poire had done. The students' roles were quite distinct. Two of them were leaders: Delanse and Blasch. The latter, much more prompt, almost constantly first, gave a good number of correct answers; Delanse, a little less lively, most often came second; sometimes he repeated Blasch's answer, but often also he worked out an original answer which, though not as reliably correct as Blasch, was right a number of times. He was thus second, from all points of view. The three others were the sheep of the group; they repeated in docile fashion, Saga more slowly still than Monne and Bout, and when one of them gave an original answer, which was quite rare, it was incorrect. These results correspond to our expectations for Bout., but we did not expect as much automatism from Monne and Saga. The second group thus differed completely from the first. In it we found three automatons and two leaders, who rivaled one another, each one seldom imitating his competitor. d

Translator’s note: The classes are numbered in descending order, so that the largest number of class contains the youngest pu pils.

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3rd group.—It was made up of 5 pupils from the 2nd class; among these five there were three who were older and more adult than the others: they are Lac., Bien, and Féli.; Lac, as I have said, shows very little suggestibility. The two other pupils, Motte and Martin, are younger, more childish; their suggestibility presents no particular marked characteristics. At first glance, it could be supposed that Lac, who is mature and composed, would lead the group. In this group, we did not find a real leader, but instead 2 categories of children; one is formed by the three oldest, Lac, Bien, and Féli., who were sometimes suggesters, sometimes imitators, and were all roughly equal; the 2 younger children, Martin and Motte, were automatic imitators. 4th group.—Made up of younger children than the previous group. There were 3 pupils from the 3rd class, Uhl, And., and Meri., and 1 pupil from the 4th class, Vand. We know that among these pupils, there is one perfect automaton, And.; the others present no particular characteristics. In fact And., as we had supposed, was very automatic; he was the slowest of all, and he almost always contented himself with repeating what others had said. The 3 others had a fairly active role; 2 were particularly prompt to answer, and they were the ones who most often made suggestions, Vand and Meri.; but curiously enough, they almost always gave wrong answers. Vand did not even give one single correct answer. They were thus leaders, but poor leaders. Uhl, who is a little slower than them, less of an initiator and more of an imitator, gave a greater number of right answers. Thus, we had 1 automaton, 2 poor leaders, and 1 child who was more accurate, but less prompt and less often followed—an independent. 5th group.—This was the group for the youngest children. Except for one, Mien, who was president, and who is in the 3rd class, all are from the 4th class. What characterized this group was that the number of imitations was very high. Two subjects, Tix and Hub, were perfect automatons, while the 3 others showed a little more initiative. The 2 leaders were Mien and Diem; the latter, although he gave fewer correct answers than Mien, more often responded first; he was the one who most often served as the model for the others’ imitation. Clearly this analytic study completely confirms the conclusions of the synthetic study presented above, and we can reproduce its conclusions and say that the grouping of children produces: 1st - A division of functions: some become leaders, others followers; 2 nd - An increase in suggestibility; and 3rd - A strong tendency toward imitation.

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