Shut up and think for yourselves

A very nice summary of how group conformity may or may not work. Based on experiments in which people were asked to judge the length of a line, with the group being stooges except for a single real participant, some generalisations :

• People may conform in their behaviour but not in belief. They may go along with a group verdict but not really believe it.
• Group composition is essential. Even a single dissenting voice can encourage others to disagree. Groups of science/engineering students apparently suffer much less from conforming to obviously wrong group decisions.
• Group conformity may be in part the result of wider contemporary culture.
• Conformity saturates. Add too many voices in support and people may get suspicious : it seems that it really is difficult to fool all of the people all of the time.
• People follow each other's opinion more when the task is difficult.
• Privacy reduces conformity, presumably by reducing the fear of being judged by the group.

The article nicely stresses all the variables, so we definitely shouldn't expect the same results in all circumstances. It would be interesting to see if those who refused to conform were just instinctively contrarian or actually had better judgement. I can think of a great many people who would make the world a much better place if they stopped trying to think for themselves, because they're just no good at it. 

Asch Conformity Experiment | Simply Psychology

By Saul McLeod, updated Dec 28, 2018 Solomon Asch conducted an experiment to investigate the extent to which social pressure from a majority group could affect a person to conform. He believed that the main problem with Sherif's (1935) conformity experiment was that there was no correct answer to the ambiguous autokinetic experiment.