Conformity and Cultural Conditioning
(An excerpt from Chapter Six of Beyond Mental
Slavery)
In 1953 Solomon Asch did a series of studies showing the power
of conformity. Students volunteered to take part in what they
were told was a vision test. In each group there was only one
volunteer subject. The rest were confederates who were helping
Asch. The real subject and the others were seated in a classroom
and asked a variety of questions about several lines drawn on
a board. Questions started out with something like "How
long is line A?" or "Which line is longer than the
others?" Everyone in the room was instructed to answer the
questions aloud.
Asch's confederates provided their answers first each time,
before the study participant. They gave the same answer as each
other every time, first answering questions correctly but eventually
giving incorrect responses. It needs to be pointed out here that
these were easy questions and that in a control group which had
no pressure to conform, only one subject out of thirty-five had
any incorrect answer to any of the questions. Asch himself hypothesized
that very few people would conform and give an obviously wrong
answer.
The results surprised him and the scientific world. Being
amongst others who all voiced incorrect answers, the real participants
gave incorrect responses more than a third of the time. 75 percent
of them answered incorrectly at least once, compared to less
than 3 percent in the control group. In further research it was
found that if there was just one confederate in the room giving
a wrong answer there was virtually no effect on the subjects,
and only a small effect with two. With three or more confederates
present, the tendency to conform was found to be relatively stable.
In case you didn't get the point here, people will deny the
evidence of their own eyes when others tell them they are seeing
something else. Some, when later confronted with their errors,
blamed poor eyesight. I would call it poor "mindsight."
We might also call it ego-fear, since presumably subjects - and
perhaps all of us to some extent - are afraid to be different
from others, and to lose their approval.
To what extent did the participants know they were answering
incorrectly while going along with the crowd anyhow? We may never
know, but it is a possibility. Such pretense may seem ridiculous,
but at least in that case they didn't necessarily have their
thinking changed to the extent that they were seeing differently.
In other words, they may have chosen to lie in order to conform
and be accepted, but they were still able to determine the truth
internally.
The other possibility is that having everyone else give the
wrong answer really did cause some participants to doubt what
they could plainly see. If that's the case, some may have lost
the ability to think, analyze, or even perceive clearly. Although
this may seem much worse, and less likely than the first possibility,
we can see the process operating in more subtle ways all the
time.
To begin with, most things are not nearly so obvious as one
line being shorter than another. Suppose, for example, you looked
at a crowd and you would have estimated the size at 400 people
if asked at that moment, but first you heard several others estimate
it at 1,200. In that case you might easily have raised your own
estimate a bit. In fact, you might not have even...
Continues in Chapter Six of Beyond Mental Slavery.
The hidden nature of cultural conditioning and conformity
is looked at in detail, with more examples. The "escape
plans" at the end of the chapter have some basic steps a
person can take to identify the influence that others have on
his or her thinking, and to get past the limitations this imposes.
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