Knowing what you see, saying what you think. Not so simple.

Apr 5, 2021

Knowing what you see, saying what you think.

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Simple and obvious isn’t it ?!

Yet numerous experiments have shown that individuals submit to what the group dictates … at the expense of common sense!

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Under the effect of the cognitive conflict given by the numerical importance of the majority, the unanimity of the majority, the social support or consensus of the majority.

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We are interested in the unconscious origin of the mechanisms that generate conformity

✅ Anxiety; sense of fear of disapproval from others

✅ sense of being in the wrong with respect to the group.

✅ adjustment to avoid being excluded from the group, despite the knowledge that the group is wrong.

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And we intend to accompany towards a greater, up to the complete freedom of thought and actions.

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Do you recognize yourself? Do you think you are immune to it?

Let’s see together the experiment of the American psychologist Solomon Asch, published in 1951, which studies the power of conformity on the decisions of an individual within a group.

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Each participant was invited to take a seat in a room to participate, had been informed, in a visual perception experience.

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In the room there were already seven other accomplices of the experimenter. The participant was positioned so that he was the last to answer the questions posed.

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Participants were presented with two images: a first with a single line and a second with 3 lines. They had to indicate which of the 3 lines had the same length as the first. The correct answers were easy and obvious to give.

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At the beginning of the experiment, the accomplices gave the correct answer and the participants also gave the correct answer more than 99% of the time.

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After a while, the accomplices sometimes unanimously gave the wrong answer. In these cases, the rate of incorrect responses from participants was 33%.

Hence, without coercion, reward or punishment, people have a tendency to “conform” to the majority while personally having a different opinion, which has been called the “Asch effect”. “

For those who refuse to believe it, this experience has been repeated many times, even by the famous Milgram, and with different variations in order to determine the influence of factors such as the number of accomplices, number of naive participants, difficulty or ambiguity of the task, men vs women, personalities, participants belonging to individualistic vs collectivist societies.