Peer Pressure on Confidence

This research is aimed to identify if an individual’s self-confidence in completing tasks successfully can be affected by peer pressure and how strong the level of peer pressure affection is. To test the research hypotheses an online experiment was conducted. The respondents of the experiment (n=350) were the students of the National Research University “Higher School of Economics” from Saint-Petersburg and Moscow campuses. The results of the experiment revealed that the participant’s beliefs about their performance were more biased when the positive type of peer pressure was applied; when the beliefs did not match, the bias tended to be less significant. The examined effects of peer pressure on different genders indicated that meanwhile women on average self-assessed their performance 11,03% lower than men, both males and females are susceptible to peer pressure to the same extent. Although participants with a higher level of self-esteem (assessed using Rosenberg’s self-esteem test) self-assessed their performance higher, no true evidence that the participants with a higher level of self-esteem were less affected by peer pressure was found. The final finding of this research was that when participants became aware of the manipulations during the main stage of the experiment, the effects of peer pressure became less significant.