Group behaviour research ; hand rising versus computer screen clicking in yes/no responses

Crowd behaviour research
Asking People to Raise Their Hands Affects How They Answer
Research fact :
Students respond differently in class when they’re asked to raise their hands and when they use electronic clickers.
Sample Size
 The researchers divided more than 1,100 students in 22 different classes into two groups:
 one would respond to questions by raising their hands; the other used clickers  ( on a computer screen )

 For most questions, answers differed significantly between the hand-raisers and the students with clickers 

In more than half of the cases, the difference between groups was more than 10 percentage points.
 When answers “matter” (i.e., when the question has only one correct answer or is sensitive), students raising their hands have a tendency to herd and vote with the majority, the authors say.

 11% of questions elicited unanimous responses from hand raising, but NO CLICKER RESPONSE ( on the computer screen)  led to a unanimous outcome !
Conclusion
The results suggest that the technique for eliciting choices affects individual responses in group settings.

Research Conducted by :
 Dan Levy, Joshua Yardley, and Richard Zeckhauser at Harvard Kennedy School.