Wednesday, October 30, 2024

Solomon Asch's famous experiment, showing that people bow to majority pressure, denying their own perceptions, successfully replicates in foreign country. And everybody is a conformist

I was vaguely familiar with the Asch Experiment, how one participant's knowledge, opinion, or understanding of shared reality can be manipulated by the group.  When I worked in a large school district, I saw his all the time.  To shore up consensus on some new program, or new trend, the district would stack a conference or a training program with personnel loyal to the district heads and program lieutenants.  To outsiders, this sounds like a conspiracy theory.  But one brave teacher raised his hand in a conference of about 40 "teachers" and asked bluntly, "How many of you in this room are district plants?"  And either stupidly or naively, a dozen hands went up.

I just had no idea that the Asch Experiment could corral 60% of an audience.  This means, contrary to the video above, that you don't need a majority of the audience to be privy to or participants in the experiment.  It's that powerful.  The cognitive dissonance of your own judgment is enough to change our minds.  And that change doesn't even have to be done with convictions, simply by peer pressure to conform.  I had no idea how powerful that was.  Well, I kind of did.  Look at any organization.  If a rumor is begun about you, and those spreading the rumor placed within it the instruction to commit violence, then that conformity contains a whole new level of concern.

This explains why critical thinking skills are essential for survival.  Too many of us take our life, our health, our wealth, and our survival for granted. 

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