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In this experiment it was expected that the subject would be more likely to imitate the behavior of the confederate. This experimental hypothesis was supported, that is 68% of the subjects did tend to imitate the confederates behavior in either of the two experimental conditions. However, the Chi-Square analyses only showed significance when the confederate-no condition was compared to the control condition, while the confederate-yes and control condition failed to show significant results. These mixed results could be because just as many of the subjects in the control condition agreed to volunteer as did the subjects in the confederate-yes condition. The results in the control condition seem to indicate that subjects are just as likely to volunteer regardless of the confederate's presence or absence, or the confederate's response. The number of subjects in the control condition volunteering for the experiment could be due to the following: it was very early in the quarter, and most of the students were not yet heavily engrossed in class assignments; or, a number of students are just naturally curious about psychology experiments.

The second hypothesis was completely rejected, as this experiment failed to find any significance in the choice of experiment based on birth order. These results do agree with experiments performed in the 1960's Rosenthal and Rosnow (1969), Ward (1964), and Suedfeld (1964). However, other experimenters found that firstborns, because of their higher need for affiliation, would most often volunteer for "group" type experiments. Most other experiments performed between the 1950's to the 1970's found that firstborns did volunteer for "group" type experiments. The results of this experiment could be due to different parenting techniques in the past 20 years which may have caused firstborns to not have as strong a need for affiliation as did firstborns raised in the 1950's to 1960's.



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