Fascinating… well, our hour’s up…
From Brainz, illuminating insights into that darkest of mysteries, the human mind: “The Ten Most Revealing Psych Experiments“… E.g…
4. Conformity: Not Believing Your Lying Eyes
From social identity theory psychologists got a handle on group dynamics and prejudices, how natural it is for groups to elicit conformity among their members. In 1951 Solomon Asch set out to identify just how much individual judgment is affected by the group.
In a test environment in which undergrads were asked to render a judgment after other subjects gave deliberately wrong answers, 50% of people gave the same wrong answer when their turn came. Only 25% of test subjects refused to be swayed by the false judgment of the others, while 5% always went with the crowd. The finding was that a third of people will ignore what they know to be true and go with a falsehood if they’re in a group that insists on the falsehood being true. What else will people do under influence of the group?
As we aspire to new levels of self-consciousness, we might might do worse than simply to head out On the Road… at the very least, we can say Happy Birthday to Jack Kerouac, who was born on this date in 1922.
