Conformity
I've borrowed a passage from Barbs new book for my blog post this week - I hope she doesn't sue me.
"I am overwhelmed by all the things that are going on around us, and I bet you are, too. What
can you do about it? Hang on and hope for the best? The U.S. has changed so much that it can never go
back to the "good old days" – and were they so good anyway? But the encroachment of bigger and
bigger government in this country means that many of our personal freedoms have been curtailed or, in
some cases, eliminated completely.
So what do we do when we don't know what to do? We look at what other people are doing
and take our cues from them. In 1951, Solomon Asch, a pioneer in the field of social psychology, wanted
to see how far people would conform to the opinions of others. Previous research had shown that,
when a situation is ambiguous, in that there is no right or wrong answer, people tend to go along with
what others do. Asch set up a situation in which the answers were completely unambiguous. He had
research participants judge the lengths of lines, showing them a line to compare to three other lines.
The question was very simple: Which of the three lines is this one most like? The answer was always
very clear. If I were to show you those comparisons, you'd think I was crazy to ask you. But what Asch
did was have each research participant sitting at a table with other people. The participant believed
that the others at the table were also participants but, in fact, they were confederates who had been
told how to respond on certain critical trials. On the first few trials the confederates gave the obvious,
correct answer, as did the real participant. But on the critical trials, the confederates gave an incorrect
answer; in the original experiment, all the confederates gave the same incorrect answer. When the
participant's turn to respond came, he (the participants were all male) faced a dilemma. It was clear
what the answer was, but all these other guys gave the incorrect answer. What did the real participant
do?
Asch believed that, because the answer was so clear, participants would ignore what the others
said and give the correct answer. However, what he found was that, averaging across all participants,
one-third of the responses on critical trials were incorrect. Overall, 75% of the participants gave at least
one incorrect answer. In a control condition, with no confederates, the error rate was less than 1%.
I should point out that the conforming responses of the real participants decreased if one of the
confederates gave an answer different from the rest of the group, especially if he gave the correct
answer.
Social psychologists have studied conformity ever since and have concluded that the tendency
to conform is strong.
The reason I brought this up is that we look at others to find out what to do. If it seems that no
one is doing anything to alleviate the problems, we think that doing nothing is the thing to do. The
problem is that we have very little information about what others might be doing. I doubt anyone who
sees me in the grocery store thinks that Ray and I are preparing the best we can for what might be
coming.
We are accumulating three-month's-worth of food. There are a number of firms who will sell
you what I call "apocalypse" supplies; they are expensive and I see no need to buy that stuff. We will
soon have enough canned vegetables and meat, dried beans, rice, and other relatively nonperishable
staples to last us three months. Don't buy it all at once, at the same place; Ray says it's like making
moonshine. You don't buy 200 pounds of sugar at one store. Someone will know that you are up to
something. And it is relatively inexpensive to do it a little bit at a time by buying a small package of beans or rice or a couple of extra cans of tuna each week. Unless you have a big family, you don't need
to buy the biggest packages; the food could spoil and go to waste before you use it all. You don't want
to have 50-pound bags of flour around to get weevil-ridden."
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