How we are corrupted.

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“From the moment that they form part of a crowd the learned man and the ignoramus are equally incapable of observation.”

— Gustave Le Bon

“Unfortunately, although naturally clever, human beings are not innately wise, especially in crowds.”

— William Ophuls

It is 75 years since Solomon Asch conducted his now famous experiments into social conformity. In the most well-known variation of these experiments, he invited eight people into a room, where they were shown a pair of cards: one card had a single black line on it, and the other had three black lines of different lengths.

Each person was asked to identify which of the three lines was the same as the single line. The group were shown eighteen pairs of cards.

There are two details that made this a deeply insightful experiment. First, on each of the cards with three lines, it was obvious which line correctly matched the other card, so the right choice was quite evident.

Second, only one person in the group was a real test subject. The other seven of the eight people were stooges: Asch had briefed them all to deliberately give the wrong answer.

Asch repeated these experiments multiple times with different groups. What he found was that despite knowing the right answer (which line matched), a significant proportion of people (36%) would override their own judgment and answer incorrectly. In his subsequent interviews and research, he found that the test subjects did not want to defy the group and stand out - they preferred to conform to the group norm, which they assumed must be right.

And that was the point of the experiment - to test the power of social norms and pressure to conform, even when not made explicit. Unlike many other well-known social science experiments, Asch’s conformity tests have been repeated over time with similar results.

Asch’s reasoning, which intuitively chimes, is that we override our own perception in order to fit in; we seek to avoid being different in a group to ensure we are accepted and safe within it. We will go as far as rejecting our own judgment in order to avoid risking our place in a group of other people.

There are understandable fears attendant to this: fear of being wrong, fear of punishment or shame, and ultimately, fear of rejection.

So we go along with things.

I have gone along with things many times. And if I were to plot those choices against my overall sense of contentment, peace and joy, I would say there’s a strong inverse relationship.

In the early part of my career, I was often engaged in work I didn’t believe in or cultures that felt wrong in a way I couldn’t quite articulate yet felt very clearly. But I looked around, saw everyone else getting on with it, and attempted to do the same.

It worked for a while, and I don’t mean weeks or months. I spent years ignoring my own judgment, intuitions and even embodied reactions to environments, people and behaviour that I knew was wrong. Eventually it caught up with me, and eventually I began to make more conscious choices. But it was a costly lesson to learn.

We all like to think of ourselves as perceptive, conscious and sovereign individuals making free choices. But this is not only a dangerous fantasy; at some level we are all aware of this delusion.

Have you ever been in a bar or restaurant and changed what you were going to order after hearing what others in your group have ordered?

Have you ever not voiced an opinion in the presence of a group once you’ve realised everyone else has a different view - and you feel it would put you in opposition to everyone else?

Have you ever gone along with a decision or course of action, perhaps at work or in your family, having initially disagreed with it, but assumed it must be right if everyone else wants to do it?

Have you ever been to see a film or a gig, formed an opinion about it, and then found yourself saying something different once you heard what others had to say?

This is the great paradox of over a century of individualism: we are free to make our own choices but only insofar as they are choices falsely presented to us as free by people in power, and choices that are themselves limited in their scope. We cannot choose what we cannot see. And we are at the mercy of the influence of the masses, like a stampede of panicking cattle.

It is in this way that we can easily make choices that act against our best interests: who we vote for, who we give power to, who we work for, who we owe money to, what we are willing to accept in our society. We look around, see that no-one else is really doing anything other than an occasional grumble in the pub, and on we go. Maybe I should just get on with it, we tell ourselves.

Systems, no matter how harmful or vicious, persist and entrench their power when no-one questions them.

It is this lack of consciousness, en masse, that has led us to where we are. Some people - and I am one of them - believe the current state of the world is not best summarised as a poly-crisis, a political crisis, an environmental crisis or a sociocultural crisis, but as a spiritual crisis.

Remarking on our consumerist culture and pollution of the planet, Joanna Macy once said that we cannot throw something away because there is no such place as ‘away’. We are merely sending our discarded waste to some other part of our home.

We don’t believe or recognise this because of our level of consciousness. We do not see ourselves as unavoidably and necessarily entangled in an ecosystem, a complex web of all life on a single planet, that we are routinely and progressively destroying. Even when presented with the evidence that we’re poisoning ourselves, we do not stop polluting our water and food sources, partly because everyone else seems fine with it.

It is why the term ecocide feels so appropriate to me. What other animal deliberately destroys its own habitat to the extent of risking extinction?

Part of being a healthy, well-developed adult is being able to locate ourselves within a group - able to participate and, to some extent, give up our sovereignty whilst not completely losing our identity, morality or ability to make judgments. Truly healthy groups of healthy people are able to hold radically different viewpoints with independence of thought, without descending into chaos, and in fact, thriving because of it.

The blame does not lie with us as individuals, but the work must start there; it can only start there. That’s the unfortunate truth of it, and if we are to become real adults, we have to accept the inequities and unfairness of a predicament like this.

As any parent will know, this is the sort of thing you have to explain to kids for them to grow up: sometimes you need to act to solve a problem you didn’t create; sometimes life presents you with things that seem unfair but still have to be done - by you. That’s the way life can be, so you have to act according to your intellect, your morals and your conscience.

And one thing you would never encourage a child to do is to blindly follow the crowd.

I’m a leadership coach, consultant and facilitator living in Berlin.

Contact me to: 

• Make sense of what’s going on with you, your work and your life through my coaching practice.*

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• Have a real conversation.

At the heart of my work is helping individuals and organisations to figure out what is really going on.

You can also find out more about my work with men & masculinity here.

*I’m taking on one new coaching client. I work with people who are looking to make sense of themselves, their lives and their work, and make extraordinary changes. If that’s you, get in touch, I’d love to chat.

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[main image, from manarch]