I recently (finally!) found a short video showing one the “classical” experiments performed by the social psychologist Solomon Asch. If this name does not ring any bell, please take two minutes of your precious time and watch this Youtube video: I promise you will not regret.
Pretty funny, isn’t it? Ironically enough, the study goes back in the days right before the beginning of the counterculture of the 1960s. This is just one of the pioneering experiments Asch performed in studying conformity. Here is another (less vintage) video of the same series -yes, another two-minute-long documentary you will love and we should show to kids in schools.
Also in the latter video, the subject tends to “maintain his own individuality” for a little while before conforming to the group. Let me briefly provide some more precise information about the second experiment (the following numbers can be found in the Wikipedia article):
1. The actors in the room with the participant were 7 and all of them systematically gave the same answer.
2. In particular, the actors responded correctly on the first two times, and gave the first wrong answer on the third trial. The total number of trials was 18 and the actors gave wrong answers for 12 times, the so called clinical trials.
3. The participant was always the last to answer.
As a result, one third of the clinical trials were wrong answers, and around 75% of the participants gave at least one wrong answer. By the way, in the control group (no actors) the probability of giving an incorrect answer is 1% (to be compared against 33%).
All the participants were interviewed after the experiments and most of them told that the reason they conformed to the majority was pretty much: “well, something must be wrong with my eyes: these people can’t all be wrong!”.
What about the 25% stubborn group-independent guys? Apparently, some were simply very confident with they own perception (I wonder if these people are smarter than the average or the opposite) while others were in great doubts but they felt they had to respond adequately not to spoil the test. Interestingly, the results were not so robust when they relaxed the conditions that all the actors give the same response: as soon as we introduce another dissenter which gives the obviously correct answers, the effect is much reduced.
Anyways, after watching all this evidence, it is pretty simple to make some explanations up: you can even bring up evolutionary arguments, and say that ultimately the reason of the success of human kind is related to our extremely social attitudes.
However, rather than speculating about why, I find the experiments far more interesting when looking at propaganda, trends and apparently absurd social phenomena as Nazism. It is not a chance that Asch was the advisor of Stanley Milgram, who later designed the experiment for the “Behavioral study of Obedience”, aimed at answering the question “is it plausible that those responsible of the Holocaust were just obeying to orders?” – and the answer of the controversial experiment is: yes.
By the way, I am pretty sure the name “Stanley Milgram” does ring a bell for people working on networks. It’s a small world after all.
- Andrea Lancichinetti