Asch Conformity Exercises

[Ben Hoskin]

" In 1951, Solomon Asch had taken some experimental subjects, and each one had been put among a row of other people who looked like them, seeming like other experimental subjects, but actually confederates of the experimenter. They'd shown a reference line on a screen, labeled X, next to three other lines, labeled A, B, and C. The experimenter had asked which line X was the same length as. The correct answer had obviously been C. The other 'subjects', the confederates, had one after another said that X was the same length as B. The real subject had been put second-to-last in the order, so as not to arouse suspicion by being last. The test had been to see whether the real subject would 'conform' to the standard wrong answer of B, or voice the obviously correct answer of C.

75% of the subjects had 'conformed' at least once. A third of the subjects had conformed more than half the time. Some had reported afterward actually believing that X was the same length as B. And that had been in a case where the subjects hadn't known any of the confederates. If you put people around others who belonged to the same group as them, like someone in a wheelchair next to other people in a wheelchair, the conformity effect got even stronger...

Hermione had a sickening feeling where this was going. "I remember," she whispered.

"I gave the Chaos Legion anti-conformity training, you know. I had each Legionnaire stand in the middle and say 'Twice two is four!' or 'Grass is green!' while everyone else in the Chaos Legion called them idiots or sneered at them - Allen Flint did really good sneers - or even just gave them blank looks and then walked away. "

Anyone else fancy doing some anti-conformity exercises?

(/debating their value)

Ben

[Anders Sandberg]

On 2012-04-12 07:38, Ben Hoskin wrote:

"I gave the Chaos Legion anti-conformity training, you know. I had each Legionnaire stand in the middle and say 'Twice two is four!' or 'Grass is green!' while everyone else in the Chaos Legion called them idiots or sneered at them - Allen Flint did really good sneers - or even just gave them blank looks and then walked away. "

Anyone else fancy doing some anti-conformity exercises?

We should make sure there is a testable component too, so we can at least check whether they work.

I wonder how much knowing about the conformity bias *decreases* the value of the exercises: you know the others are confederates and their views don't really matter. At the same time, the social psychology benefit of learning to resist group pressure might still be worthwhile.

Although we might want to find ways to train ourselves in *rational* conformity resisting. We have a paper in the works at FHI about how in some decision making situations the least conformist member of a group will tend to be 1) wrong, and 2) make the wrong decision for all of the group. Hence in such situations it would be rational if you are the minority to actually go against your own conviction.

-- 
Anders Sandberg
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford University

[Marc Warner]

In agreement with Anders, there was a recent science paper that showed that under certain circumstances it is possible that the ignorant and easily swayed can be helpful in aiding groups to reach good decisions:

Can Ignorance Promote Democracy?

"Ideas are like fire, observed Thomas Jefferson in 1813—information can be passed on without relinquishing it (1). Indeed, the ease and benefit of sharing information select for individuals to aggregate into groups, driving the buildup of complexity in the biological world (2, 3). Once the members of some collective—whether cells of a fruit fly or citizens of a democratic society—have accumulated information, they must integrate that information and make decisions based upon it. When these members share a common interest, as do the stomata on the surface of a plant leaf (4), integrating distributed information may be a computational challenge. But when individuals do not have entirely coincident interests, strategic problems arise. Members of animal herds, for example, face a tension between aggregating information for the benefit of the herd as a whole, and avoiding manipulation by self-interested individuals in the herd. Which collective decision procedures are robust to manipulation by selfish players (5)? On page 1578 of this issue, Couzin et al. (6) show how the presence of uninformed agents can promote democratic outcomes in collective decision problems." http://www.sciencemag.org/content/334/6062/1503.full

That's not to say that there aren't times when resisting a collective will be very important. It's just that, as Anders makes clear, the circumstances matter. Potentially, the first step is to try to find some sort of phase diagram for decision making, so that we can estimate what the likely failure mode of the group is, then determine whether we are likely to need to express or repress our opinion. 

Cheers,

Marc

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Marc Warner

London Centre for Nanotechnology

17-19 Gordon Street

London

WC1H 0AH

Office: +44 (0)2076799938 (39938)

Lab: +44 (0)2076793152 (33152)

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