Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [71]
That membership confers on us some very significant advantages. Some of these are practical, as I’ve already noted. Since communal beliefs are familiar, established, and supported (socially if not factually), hewing to them is both comfortable and efficient. It is also remunerative: typically, the goods a community has on offer—from professional opportunities to political power—are awarded to those who share its beliefs and withheld from those who don’t. But the most important advantages we gain from membership in a community are the emotional ones: the comfort, pleasure, and security of being surrounded by people who agree with and understand us. Taken together with more practical and material factors, these psychological benefits provide a powerful incentive to keep faith with those around us. And keep faith we do—even, as we are about to see, when doing so leads us into error, folly, and travesty.
In the 1950s, the social psychologist Solomon Asch conducted what has become one of the most famous experiments in the history of his field. Asch brought groups of five to eight people into a classroom and showed them two flashcards at a time—one with a single vertical line on it, the other with three vertical lines. He then asked the people to tell him, one at a time and out loud, which line on the second card was the same length as the line on the first card.
As you can see from the above images, this is not a terribly challenging task. Young children can do it correctly, and in control experiments designed to determine baseline success rates, Asch’s subjects sailed through the flashcards without any difficulty.
In the actual experiment, however, there was a hitch: only one of the people in the room was really a subject. The others were working for Asch (“stooges,” in psych-experiment parlance), and, per his instructions, after the first few flashcards, they all began to give the same wrong answer. The consequences for the lone authentic subject were striking. Three-quarters of them gave the wrong answer at least once, and one-quarter gave the wrong answer for half or more of the flashcards. On average, the subjects’ error rate rose from under 1 percent when acting independently to almost 37 percent when influenced by the group.
The Asch line studies tend to make people queasy, and with good reason. None of us like to think that we are unduly influenced by peer pressure, and all of us want to believe that we call things as we see them, regardless of what those around us say. So it is disturbing to imagine that we so readily forsake the evidence of our own senses just to go along with a group. Even more disturbing, though, is the possibility that we do this unconsciously. That possibility was suggested by Gregory Berns, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at Emory University, who conducted a modified version of the Asch studies in 2005. Berns got roughly the same results as Asch (the wrong answers given by his stooges held sway 41 percent of the time), but his subjects participated from within functional magnetic resonance imaging machines, devices that measure activity in the brain. As the subjects were giving their wrong answers, those measurements showed increased activity in the part of the brain responsible for spatial awareness, but not in the parts responsible for higher-level cognition, such as conscious decision-making and conflict-resolution. Berns concluded that his subjects were calling it like they saw it. They weren’t knowingly suppressing a correct answer to conform with the judgment of the group. Instead, the judgment of the group actually changed how they saw the lines.
The Asch studies and their recent high-tech replication provide a particularly stark example of a universal phenomenon: like pre-Copernican Western astronomers, we see things as those around us see