Being Wrong (Kathryn Schulz) p145
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 them. In fact, as these studies show, we do so even when the people around us aren’t neighbors or relatives or friends, but just an ad hoc community of strangers. And we do so even when this “community” is tiny; in subsequent studies, Asch found that the social-conformity effect kicked in with the use of just three fake subjects. Moreover, we do so even when the judgment in question concerns a straightforward matter of fact, such as the comparative length of a series of lines. How much more susceptible to peer pressure must we be, then, when it comes from large groups of people with whom we share a place, a history, and a culture-and when it is brought to bear on far more complicated and ambiguous evidence? In Other words, how much more must our real communities influence our real beliefs?
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