When Are We All Finally Going to Stop Living in Fear?
Back in the 1950s, this psychology professor at Swarthmore had an idea. He wondered just how powerful peer pressure was.
So he rounded up 123 students.
They were all dudes.
He put them in groups of five or seven. He told one dude in every group he was conducting vision tests. He told the rest of the group he was really studying peer pressure. He told them all to give the right answer the first two times. After that, they were supposed to give the same wrong answer for almost every question. The wrong answer wasn't just a little wrong.
It was obviously wrong.
Epically wrong.
The professor expected the one dude to hold his ground most of the time, that he wouldn't conform. The professor was wrong. Only about 25 percent of his test subjects resisted the urge to conform. About a third of them conformed almost all of the time, and 5 percent conformed completely.
The professor's name was Solomon Asch. His studies became known as the Asch Conformity Experiments. They demonstrated someth…