What someone, especially an authority figure, says can impact your recollection or memory of an event because you believe that they are correct since they are knowledgeable on the subject, even if they are incorrect.

WHAT IS THE POWER OF SUGGESTION?

The power of suggestion is when someone's ideas or words influences what we think or do. It's like a mind trick that can make us believe in certain things or act in certain ways. As stated by Study.com, "If a person believes in an expected outcome, they are more likely to automatically achieve that outcome. This is the basis for the power of suggestibility. This phenomenon is used in psychology and healthcare to greatly improve the lives of people."

More specifically, for our project, we're researching how it can influence our recollection of an event

TYPES OF SUGGESTION

Based on the source of the suggestion

• Auto-suggestion: Auto-suggestion when a person uses the power of suggestion on themselves subconsiously. Have you ever heard someone tell you that your words affect yourself? Auto-suggestion is at work here! For example, when you are sick, you might tell yourself that you are getting better, and your brain believes this, sending out effects that indeed help you to heal faster.
• Contra-suggestion: Contra-suggestion is when the suggestion comes from someone you hate. Not only do you reject the suggestion but you also do the opposite.
• Mass suggestion: This occurs when the majority is in favor of one thing and as you don't want to be judged or are fearful of having the public opinion turn on you, you go along with what everone else says. For example, if you are voting in school and out of the 29 people in your class, 28 want one book. You, the lone person who wants the other book, is afraid of being judged by the other 28 people so you either go along and vote for the other book with them or just abscond your vote.
• Prestige suggestion: This is the type of suggestion that we are mainly focusing on. This suggestion comes from an "authority figure" – someone that you believe is in charge or is knowledgeable on the subject. The person's status, fame, achivements, knowledge, experience, age, or position in society affects the way that you view them as well. This type of suggestion may be the easiest to subconsiously accept and view as the truth because you believe what they say or you are eager for their help or advice. For example, if you are being questioned as a witness by your principal, who asks if a certain peron was at the event of a certain delinquency and you aren't certain that they are but the principal keeps telling you to think again and see if you can remember them being there, you might remember them since that figure of authority is basically telling you to. This can be harmful because if you remembered them there even though they weren't, you could get an innocent person into trouble.

Based on the manner of the suggestion

• Positive suggestion: These are suggestions that nudge us along the right path. They can be very helpful and they may even improve our situations. For example: you were getting ready for your race but you didn't think you were ready since you have never ran that far that fast, but your coach came and gave you a pep talk. The next day, you won your race despite never having practised. The pep talk that your coach (a person of authority and expertise in this subject) gave you was a positive suggestion that made you believe that you could do it and your body responded accordingly.
• Negative suggestion: The opposite of a positive suggestion, this is a harmful nudge in the wrong direction that can lead to a negative end. For example: You're getting ready for a big speech at school. You're filled with self-confidence and positive energy but along comes the "popular girl" who you think holds power and authority, and whose opinion you value. The "popular girl" tells you how lame your speech is and lists the ways that she'll think you'll fail. This gets in your head and you no longer have that self-confidence that you were overflowing with meme moments ago. You go out onto the stage... and bomb it.
• Positive auto-suggestion: These are suggestions that come from your own mind. Like positive suggestions, they are extremely helpful and can improve our daily occurences. They are crucial in building self confidence. An example of this is as simple as saying a positive daily mantra every day in the mirror.
• Negative auto-suggestion: Have you ever just started berating yourself, saying things (that may be true, may be not) such as "I'm fat", or "I'm ugly", or "I'm worthless", or "I'm a faliure"? This is a form of negative auto-suggestions. These are the positive auto-suggestion's detrimental opposite. It can be dangerous if frequently used and not dealt with by someone who can help you, such as a psychologist. As said in an article from The Black Sheep Community, "It kills from within... It can lead to guilt, failure, sickness, and so on."

FACTORS THAT AFFECT THE POWER OF SUGGESTION

• Age: It is scientifically proven that the younger a person is, the more susceptible to the power of suggestion they are. This is because the younger you are, especially with children, the more you lack experience. Children also have less skills of discernment and reason. This ties in with our experiment, proving that children ARE more susceptible to suggestion.
• Gender: Gender may affect the effect of the power of suggestion because males in general have been proven to have a larger ego, therefore making them less susceptible to suggestion.
• Emotion: Emotion makes a person highly suggestible. This ties in to the gender aspect as well. As women are more prone to emotion, the power of suggestion may work more on them.
• Intelligence: A more intelligent person will question what the authority figure says more than a less intelligent person who will just accept the answer as it is.
• Knowledge: As The Black Sheep Community puts it, "The higher the knowledge, the lesser the power of suggestion", meaning that it will work less well on a person that is more knowledgeable. This is because they may contradict your suggestion with a point of their knowledge.
• Arrogance: An arrogant person may be less suggestible because they may believe that they are always right and that they already know everything. They may simply refuse to believe that you are right.
• Interest: If a person is less interested in the topic on which you are suggesting something, they may simply dump or forget about the suggestion.
• Personality: The world is full of different people with different personalities and this definitely affects the power of suggestion. An introvert is harder to be convinced than an extrovert.
• Temperament: A person with a low temperament is more easily convinced than a person with a high one.
• Source of the suggestion: A suggestion from the Prime Minister of Canada would definitely have a stronger effect on the public than it would if, for example, I opened up Instagram and posted the same opinion. This is because people look up to authority figures and consider them to have a notable opinions on things, even if it is a faulty appeal to authority; for example, political leaders, celebrities, famous professors, or people viewed as leaders (bosses, leaders of organizations, people with a title) in today's world. This expecially applies to children as most people, including older children, are viewed as authority figures to them.

REAL LIFE APPLICATIONS

• The placebo effect: The placebo effect is where patients are told to take medicine that will help heal or boost them in a certain way. However, this medicine is not actually effictive but because the patient believes that it is, the results of the medicine are still the same as if they were taking the actual thing.
• Magic shows: When you watch a magic show, the power of suggestion is often used, in multiple different ways. The people on stage aren't actually performing magic, but it can definitely look like that because that's what you're expecting or what you think it is, even if a part of you is telling you otherwise. Misdirection is also often used in magic shows; the performer may say something to draw your attention away from how the trick is actually performed, such as. "I want you all to look at my wand", so you look at the wand while he uses sleight-of-hand to do the trick.
• Advice: The power of suggestion is implemented in a simple piece of advice, such as, "You should try exercising. Recent studies has shown it makes you happier!". This suggestion stays in your mind, even if you don't think it does. Later, you may go exercise, subconsiously following that piece of advice that person gave you.
• Ads: Ads use suggestion through many different ways, one being the fallacy of a loaded question. (where, by answering one part of the question, you are unconsiously agreeing to another; ex: Do you think that this prizewinning project should get a special mention as well?) These ads use this fallacy to suggest to you that you are incomplete without something or that you desperately need that thing that they are advertising; for example, "Do you want to be happy? You can, with this new energy drink!" suggesting to you that without the energy drink, you are unhappy.
• Ads (Pt 2): Another way that ads use the power of suggestion is that they subconsiously suggest things that get in your head and make you want to buy the product.

NEGATIVE SIDES TO THE POWER OF SUGGESTION

• The suggestions may subconsiously prevent us from doing what we wanted, or doing it the way that we wanted
• It also contradicts the idea of free will
• It could be used to harm people if used in detrimental ways
• Negative suggestion and negative auto-suggestion can both be harmful. Negative suggestion could lead to someone's failure while negative auto-suggestion could worsen their mental health and lead to dangerous choices.

For this, we used the websites The Black Sheep Community (https://www.theblacksheep.community/power-of-suggestion/) and Study.com (https://study.com/academy/lesson/power-of-suggestion-examples-experiment-definition.html#:~:text=Psychologists%20use%20the%20power%20of,the%20suggestibility%20of%20an%20individual.)

Thank you so much to both sites! They helped us greatly with our background research and we may not have gotten this far without them!

Independant Variable: The people whom we did the "memory game" with and to whom we mentioned the grey kitten with green eyes sitting down

Dependant Variable: The responses of the poeple whom we did the "memory game" with and to whom we mentioned the grey kitten with green eyes sitting down

Control Variable: The peole whom we did the "memory game" with and to whom we did not mention the grey kitten with green eyes sitting down

Constant Variable: The poster, the questions, the way we described the grey kitten with green eyes sitting down, the place where we did the experiment, the amount of kids we took out per time, the amount of time they looked at the poster, the amount of time between check-ins, the amount of time they had to write down their answers each time, the fact that we only took out one boy and one girl at a time

We disguised this as a memory game. We went around the school and asked two students (one boy and one girl) from every grade to participate. We showed them a poster of cats for ten seconds, waited for ten more, then asked them to write down (or dictate to us if they were in a younger grade) what they remembered for five minutes. We then checked what they wrote down and casually remarked that they forgot "Firefly, a grey kitten with green eyes sitting down". The next day, we came and did a follow-up test where they had to write down the cats that they remembered. When we analysed the results, we looked for anybody writing down any description that might relate to Firefly (his name; a grey cat; green eyes; a cat sitting down).

• When we gave the examples, for the younger children, at first they just said whatever we gave as an example last -- they were being influenced by what we, authority figures to them, said.
• Only one person specifially mentioned Firefly by name but many more mentioned multiple attributes of said cat.
• The younger kids (K-4) mentioned Firefly more than the older kids (5-8) did
• We put down examples for the kids to see what to write; quite a few of them just wrote down whatever was there

About 78% of people (14 people out of 18) we tested wrote Firefly or a characteristic of Firefly in the follow-up sheet. This leads us to believe that our hypothesis is correct.

For our project, we noticed that the younger kids mentioned Firefly, the grey kitten with green eyes sitting down way more than the older kids did. This led us to the conclusion that the younger you are, the more susceptible you are to suggestion.

(The control group had 3 out of 14, roughly 21% mention Firefly's characteristics)

The Eights had none

The Sevens had one (mentioned a grey cat)

The Sixes had both (one who mentioned Firefly by name, one who mentioned a grey cat sitting)

The Fives had both (one mentioned green eyes, one mentioned a grey cat)

The Fours had both (one mentioned a grey cat sitting, one mentioned Firefly by name)

The Threes had both (both mentioned a grey cat sitting)

The Twos had one (mentioned Firefly by name)

The Ones had both (both mentioned a grey cat sitting)

The Kindergartens had both (one mentioned a grey cat, one mentioned a cat with green eyes sitting)

Our conclusion is that our hypothesis is mostly correct; suggestion can alter your recollection of an event. However, it doesn't work that well if you are not viewed as an authority figure.

This applies, as stated in our Basic Project Information, to firsthand witness accounts. We conclude from our experiment that, yes, what an authority figure suggests can sway someone's opinion, recollection of an event, or memory. If, for example, a police officer is interrogating you as a firsthand witness to a person who committed a murder and their prime suspect is a tall man with a green shirt driving a BMW, the officer might accidentally give out suggestions that lead you to believe that that was what you saw, even if you actually saw an average sized man with a black shirt driving a Toyota. You could completely throw the case off track.

When interrogating first hand witnesses, police officers must be careful not to mention anything that could bias the witness and instead remain neutral and ask the prepared questions.

The Public Prosecution Service of Canada states, "The U.S. Innocence Project estimates that eyewitness error was a contributing cause in 70 percent of the 356 wrongfully convicted accused who have been exonerated by DNA evidence in that country. The American Psychological Association estimates that one in three eyewitnesses make an erroneous identification." The article later goes on to say, "Eyewitnesses can make mistakes and their memories can be impacted by a variety of factors, including being inadvertently influenced or biased by police officers and police procedures."

This experiment was more child-based so we didn't have any adults to test on

The enviroment wasn't the same for all the kids (as recess started, kids started coming out of their classrooms)

The participants were all from the same school, so there might be a bit of a bias

Another person was helping us conduct the experiment so the process may not have been completely followed

We may not have been viewed as authority figures by the older kids, since we're closer to their age and they view us as peers, despite the fact that we may be "knowledgeable" on the subject.

Emotions greatly effect how the power of suggestion works, so as the participants' emotions weren't constant, some might've been more suggestible than others.

If the kids for whom we were writing were too close to each other, they may have overheard one another mention Firefly and just put it down because they want to get more correct.

We acknowledge that none of the information found in our research neither belongs to us nor came from us. These pieces of information belong to their websites and authors respectively.

We also acknowledge that the idea for our project came from Science Buddies; the original procedure came from Science Buddies as well although we have changed and modified it.

We would like to give a special thank-you to our volunteers! We wouldn't have been able to complete this project with out their help! We have specified below our volunteers in both the Results Group and the Control Group.

Thank you to the teachers at Calgary Classical Academy as well for letting us take your students out, especially in the middle of class!

Our volunteers:

Results Group

Kindergarden: Beatris

Grade One: Asleoluwa and Brooklyn

Grade Two: Anya and Jasper

Grade Three: Miriam and Walker

Grade Four: Sam and Stuti

Grade Five: Jaylene and Ollie

Grade Six: Stefan and Zoë

Grade Seven: Austin and Elizabeth

Grade Eight: Hannah and Titus

Control Group

(Kindergartens and Grade Ones were not avaliable)

Grade Two: Aelisha and Eshaan

Grade Three: Deon and Olivia

Grade Four: Aashvith and Kathryn

Grade Five: Eliana and Matei

Grade Six: Jason and Misri

Grade Seven: Andrei and Catherine

Grade Eight: Amelie and Theodor