Have you ever ignored the truth to stay with the group?
In 1956 the psychologist Solomon Asch made an experiment to test the influence of the group on personal opinions.
THE EXPERIMENT:
A) The experiment consisted in putting one unaware subject among a group of 6-7 people who were accomplices of the experimenter, to/and ask them to estimate the length of different lines.
In the first two rounds, the accomplices would have given the right answers. In the following rounds, instead, they would have missed it, although the right answer was always obvious. The subject was placed at the end of the row and would have answered last.
RESULTS:
Asch tested 31 subjects and proved that more than the 30% of the answers of the subjects conforms to the majority, even if it is wrong, whereas over than the 76% of the subjects conforms at least once.
What happened?
The subjects were perfectly aware of which the correct answers were, but due to the influence of group pressure, started doubting themselves and their perception and eventually decided to stick with the majority. They did not want to appear as the “dumbest kid in the group”.
Asch decided to redo the experiment in two variants.
B)The first variant established that one of the accomplices, who sit as third in the row, would have always given the right answers. The consequence of this little change in the arrangement was a stunning decrease of the percentages recorded by the first experiment: no one of the subjects surrendered in all the rounds, so every subject gave at least one correct answer. The only reason of it was the presence of one other person (the third in the row) who was giving the right answers. This really demonstrates that “there is safety in numbers” and we feel more self-confidence if there is someone who sticks with us.
C) The second variant established that there was only one accomplice among a group of unaware subjects. As in the first experiment, the accomplice would have given the wrong answers, but this time he would have been in the minority. As a result, the group of subjects started mocking him and regard him as the “dumb person” in the group.
It is interesting to point out how those subjects who were mocking the “different person” because he was giving the wrong answers, would have the 76% of possibility to give the exact same wrong answers, at least once, if they happened to be in the situation A).
As a matter of fact, Asch was part of the Gestalt psychology school and sure enough his work mirrors the main principle of Gestalt thought, that is to say that the whole is not only greater than the sum of its parts, but the essence of the whole alters the parts. Asch stated: “Most social acts have to be understood in their setting, and lose meaning if isolated. No error in thinking about social facts is more serious than the failure to see their place and function”.
With his experiments Asch studied the power of conformism in changing the convictions and believes of the individuals. There is no need of providing people with actual false information to manipulate and influence their certainties and senses. To grasp the importance of this statement you can just think about how the law of conformism has always influenced mankind throughout history, how it was used by propaganda, especially by the Fascist and Nazi ones, to reach devastating impacts.
As Aristotle used to say, “the human being is a social animal” and is scared to be left out of the group. Consequently, he his unlike to walk upstream, since he knows that the others could consider him the “dumbest kid in the group”. This is the law of conformism.
SOURCES: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon_Asch
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOBhKR4MK3w