We are social animals and what others think matters deeply to us. The group’s opinion isn’t everything; we can buck the trend. But even when the other people involved are strangers, even when we are anonymous, even when dissenting will cost us nothing, we want to agree with the group.
And that’s when the answer is instantly clear and inarguably true. Crutchfield’s experiment involved slightly more ambiguous questions, including one in which people were asked if they agreed with the statement “I believe we are made better by the trials and hardships of life.” Among subjects in a control group that was not exposed to the answers of others, everyone agreed. But among those in the experiment who thought that everyone else disagreed with the statement, 31 percent said they did not agree. Asked whether they agreed with the statement “I doubt whether I would make a good leader,” every person in the control group rejected it. But when the group was seen to agree with the statement, 37 percent of people went along with the consensus and agreed that they doubted themselves.
Crutchfield also designed three questions that had no right answer. They included a series of numbers that subjects were asked to complete, which was impossible because the numbers were random. In that case, 79 percent of participants did not guess or otherwise struggle to come up with their own answer. They simply went with what the group said.
These studies of conformity are often cited to cast humans as sheep, and it certainly is disturbing to see people set aside what they clearly know to be correct and say what they know to be false. That’s all the more true from the perspective of the early 1950s, when Asch and Crutchfield conducted their classic experiments. The horror of fascism was a fresh memory and communism was a present threat. Social scientists wanted to understand why nations succumbed to mass movements, and in that context it was chilling to see how easy it is to make people deny what they see with their own eyes.
But from an evolutionary perspective, the human tendency to conform is not so strange. Individual survival depended on the group working together, and cooperation is much more likely if people share a desire to agree. A band of doubters, dissenters, and proud nonconformists would not do so well hunting and gathering on the plains of Africa.
Conformity is also a good way to benefit from the pooling of information. One person knows only what he knows, but thirty people can draw on the knowledge and experience of thirty, and so when everyone else is convinced there are lions in the tall grass it’s reasonable to set aside your doubts and take another route back to camp. The group may be wrong, of course. The collective opinion may have been unduly influenced by one person’s irrational opinion or by bad or irrelevant information. But still, other things being equal, it’s often best to follow the herd.
It’s tempting to think things have changed. The explosion of scientific knowledge over the last five centuries has provided a new basis for making judgments that is demonstrably superior to personal and collective experience. And the proliferation of media in the last several decades has made that knowledge available to anyone. There’s no need to follow the herd. We can all be fully independent thinkers now.
Or rather, we can be fully independent thinkers if we understand the following sentence, plucked from the New England Journal of Medicine: “In this randomized, multicenter study involving evaluators who were unaware of treatment assignments, we compared the efficacy and safety of posaconazole with those of fluconazole or itraconazole as prophylaxis for patients with prolonged neutropenia.” And this one from a physics journaclass="underline" “We evaluate the six-fold integral representation for the second-order exchange contribution to the self-energy of a dense three-dimensional electron gas on the Fermi surface.” And then there’s this fascinating insight from a journal of cellular biology: “Prior to microtubule capture, sister centromeres resolve from one another, coming to rest on opposite surfaces of the condensing chromosome.”
Clearly, today’s fully independent thinker will have to have a thorough knowledge of biology, physics, medicine, chemistry, geology, and statistics. He or she will also require an enormous amount of free time. Someone who wants to independently decide how risky it is to suntan on a beach, for example, will find there are thousands of relevant studies. It would take months of reading and consideration in order to draw a conclusion about this one simple risk. Thus if an independent thinker really wishes to form entirely independent judgments about the risks we face in daily life, or even just those we hear about in the news, he or she will have to obtain multiple university degrees, quit his or her job, and do absolutely nothing but read about all the ways he or she may die until he or she actually is dead.
Most people would find that somewhat impractical. For them, the only way to tap the vast pools of scientific knowledge is to rely on the advice of experts—people who are capable of synthesizing information from at least one field and making it comprehensible to a lay audience. This is preferable to getting your opinions from people who know as little as you do, naturally, but it too has limitations. For one thing, experts often disagree. Even when there’s widespread agreement, there will still be dissenters who make their case with impressive statistics and bewildering scientific jargon.
Another solution is to turn to intermediaries—those who are not experts themselves but claim to understand the science. Does abortion put a woman’s health at risk? There’s heaps of research on the subject. Much of it is contradictory. All of it is complicated. But when I took a look at the Web site of Focus on the Family, a conservative lobby group that wants abortion banned, I see that the research quite clearly proves that abortion does put a woman’s health at risk. Studies are cited, statistics presented, scientists quoted. But then when I look at the Web site of the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL), a staunchly pro-choice lobby group, I discover that the research indisputably shows abortion does not put a woman’s health at risk. Studies are cited, statistics presented, scientists quoted.
Now, if I happened to trust NARAL or Focus on the Family, I might decide that their opinion is good enough for me. But a whole lot of people would look at this differently. NARAL and Focus on the Family are lobby groups pursuing political agendas, they would think. Why should I trust either of them to give me a disinterested assessment of the science? As Homer Simpson sagely observed in an interview with broadcaster Kent Brockman, “People can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. Forty percent of all people know that.”
There’s something to be said for this perspective. On important public issues, we constantly encounter analyses that are outwardly impressive— lots of numbers and references to studies—that come to radically different conclusions even though they all claim to be portraying the state of the science. And these analyses have a suspicious tendency to come to exactly the conclusions that those doing the analyzing find desirable. Name an issue, any issue. Somewhere there are lobbyists, activists, and ideologically driven newspaper pundits who would be delighted to provide you with a rigorous and objective evaluation of the science that just happens to prove that the interest, agenda, or ideology they represent is absolutely right. So, yes, skepticism is warranted.