The results showed that hypothesis 1 was accepted. The second hypothesis was also accepted, the older woman was awarded significantly higher compensation than the younger woman.
So, these just world hypotheses were a considerable amount of support and the reasons being for this support could have been either that the participants felt that the older woman would have been more psychologically damaged or sustained more physical injuries than the younger woman. However, some might disagree and say that the younger woman will live for much longer than the older woman and therefore would suffer the consequences more much longer. Another reason could have been that the older woman was considered to be more innocent than the younger woman because young people tend to go out looking for sexual activity, which is more commonly as “on the pull”. Ethics have to be put into consideration because even though the study was conducted perfectly well the woman was a victim of a horrible crime and hopefully consent was taken from the woman.
This study relates to persuasion techniques because it finds a way to make people believe in a just world. But some argue that it’s not the best way to judge something.
The second piece of evidence concerns the scientific case study by Bidrose & Goodman in 2000 called memory for child sexual abuse. The main aims were to examine the testimony given by a group of children in the course of a sexual abuse investigation, assess the level of support for the allegations made and the extent of abuse for the children who made no allegations.
The participants were four girls aged 8, 13, 14 and 15. They testified about sex exploitation that involved eight adult men. The girls’ testimony was compared with several hundred photographs and audio taped records of the abuse
The results showed that for about 80% of the allegations there was supportive evidence, but more specifically: 85.6% of alleged sexual acts (kissing, fellatio, intercourse). 42.9% of coercive acts (paying or promising to pay for sex, paying for photo sessions). 82.5% of alleged preparatory acts (girls posing for photos, the arranging of sex sessions with men).
The percentage of the results was very high but would have been higher still if there wasn’t a problem with transcribing the tapes meaning that it was not always possible to identify what sexual acts were happening. Some tapes with certain illegal acts on them had also been taped over. So therefore there was a very high level of accuracy in the children’s allegations. There was evidence to shows that the children made slight errors in omission and in commission but was said to be due to missing evidence rather than the girls lying about a situation. The study also revealed that the children would not disclose the abuse to any adult even though they wanted it to stop. Therefore this study shows that children can give accurate and detailed information in a courtroom, which is no easy task especially when testifying about being abused sexually. We also have to take into consideration that these girls were extremely young and had been threatened and tricked by the organiser not to disclose anything about the activities and to keep coming. Just adding to the difficulty they must have faced. This can also related to persuasion techniques and this how they persuaded the children.
The final piece of evidence is by Asch S.E who produced a laboratory study in 1955 called Opinions and social pressure of which the main being to investigate the effects of a majority influence on a minority of one, using a simple perception task.
There were, in total, 123 participants from three different institutions. On each series of the trials a group of 7 to 9 male students were seated at a table, just like regular jury when discussing a case, only one of them was a true participant however and was seated on the last seat. The experimenter would then ask the participants an obvious question concerning the lengths of some lines, knowing that the false participants would give an incorrect answer the experimenter wanted to see if the real participant would conform to the others.
The results showed that an incorrect answer was given 36.8% of time by a true participant.
There were several possible reasons for them to yield, some said that they were wrong and the majority were correct, some thought that the majority were victims of an optical illusion and some believed that they were in someway deficient and wanted to hide this from the others. We can, therefore see that conformity is considered so normal that people give an incorrect answer even if they know they know the right one, this put into situation how we educate in this country. Also, all the participants agreed that being independent was preferred to conforming, a lot didn’t however. Conformity is one of the most famous persuasion techniques that exist mainly because it’s so easy to create, seen in every day life and invisible to the naked eye.
When outlined and examined we can see that the three pieces evidence each have something to do with persuasion techniques in their own way, two of the studies were not, however, based in a courtroom but they did remind us of a group in a similar to the position of a jury.
