Go along to get along....reality be damned?

We’ve all heard the saying that sometimes you just go along to get along, to keep things running smoothly. Does this include times when we are ready to bend our judgment to social influence even when to do so might mean denying the evidence of our senses?

You might have to be as old as I am for this chestnut of a psychology experiment to be familiar, but more perhaps if you are a recent college freshman who has taken Psychology 101 you’ll have heard about this study from social psychology’s classic experimental past where, in 1951, Solomon Asch performed a series of elegant experiments to examine the “interaction between individuals and groups when the paramount issue is that of remaining independent or submitting to social pressure.”  What makes the results of this set of experiments so compelling is that, unlike the potentially emotional complexity that attends the viewing of and reactions of fans viewing a football game, and unlike the emotionally neutral yet unusual task set for subjects by Heider and Simmel, Asch only asked subjects to make comparative judgments of straight lines of varying lengths.  What, in other words, could be simpler?

The set up for the study is straightforward: groups of subjects are brought together, presented with a ‘standard’ line and are then asked to choose, from a set of three comparison lines, the one that matches a standard line.  Simple enough one would think.  However, over several variations of the experiment, degrees of “dissent from reality” occurred. That is, unbeknownst to the actual subject of the experiment, most (usually all) of the other participants were planted by Asch and his colleagues and were instructed to sometimes give different judgments; that is, to choose a line that was clearly different from the standard line.  What was the result?

While the percentages varied across the several experimental variations, more of the real subjects than one would like to think went along with the incorrect judgments of the majority. As already noted, the percentage of the judgments that were consistent with the “reality denying” majority varied, from a low of 9% to a high of nearly 32%.  What was the major source of these variations? 

First was the size of the dissenting group which varied from one dissenter up to the full group, which was anywhere from 7 to 9 and in one variation, up to 15 students, including the ‘real” subject where a dissenter was someone who gave an answer different from the subject, but also different from the group. Asch and his colleagues found that with only one dissenter, judges always made the correct choice.  When this number was increased to two, errors rose to 13.6 percent, which then jumped to 31.8 percent when the size of the group making obviously incorrect judgments was three, which proved to be the maximum required to produce a sense of pressure to go along.  After that, increases in the number of majority made little difference.

Leaving aside those who consistently resisted – and there were such brave souls – were there any pressure releasing variations that might lead the subjects to break away from the majority and judge correctly the reality that was right in front of their eyes?  There were.  These were, in some ways as surprising as the conformity that stands as the central experimental result.

The key variation that led to rebellion against the majority of judges who gave clearly incorrect judgments was having one other judge also give an incorrect judgment but one that differed from the majority.  In other words, it wasn’t seeing someone else make the correct judgment that freed the subject to say what their eyes told them was true, but rather just seeing someone be willing to go against the group, even if, in doing so they too were wrong.  Thus, if among the three choices answer ‘C’ was the correct one, if the lone dissenter chose ‘B’ while the majority chose ‘A’, this increased the likelihood that the real subject would feel free to rebel, push against the group and choose ‘C’.  Not seeing someone else, who like you, knows what is correct, but instead, seeing someone willing to disagree was what emboldened the subjects to say what they knew to be true. The roots of dissent then are sometimes not in agreement with others, but in the permission their disagreement gives us to hold fast to the truth our eyes deliver. For the truth does matter.