It is Real and Right Because the Group Says So

Group pressure is enormously effective in producing social conformity, and nowhere is the pressure to conform stronger than in small, close-knit groups. Just how powerful group pressure can be has been demonstrated experimentally. Solomon Asch conducted one of the earliest and most famous studies. The psychologist showed subjects two cards. On the first card was one line. The second card had three lines, one of which was the same length as the line on the first card. Then the subjects were asked which of the three lines matched the line on the first card. Before the experiment began, Asch had arranged with seven confederates to give their answers before the other subjects did. Furthermore, he instructed the confederates to sometimes give wrong answers. Despite the simplicity of the task, three out of four unsuspecting subjects agreed with the incorrect answers given by the confederates at least once, and one in four agreed with the wrong answer fifty percent of the time.

In 2005, a half-century later, Gregory Berns, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist updated the Asch study and found almost identical results. Berns had a group of subjects look at objects, then decide whether they were the same or different. One by one participants were hooked up to a brain scanner, allowing researchers to see which part of the brain responded to the task. Thirty-two people volunteered for the study. Unbeknownst to the subjects, four other people they met in the waiting room had been prompted by Berns to give fake answers to some of the questions. The subject and the confederates met in a waiting room where they chatted, played a practice round, and took pictures of one another, all as a way of forming a group bond. Then the subject went into the MRI room. The subjects were told that first the others would discuss their observations as a group, then decide if they were the same or different. The subject was shown the group answer, then the object. Sometimes the group unanimously gave an incorrect response, others times a unanimously correct one. A few mixed answers were also included. On average, subjects went along with incorrect answers more than 40% of the time.

The MRI imaging showed that the subjects who gave in to group pressure had activity in the part of the brain that is devoted to spatial perception, and those who didn’t give in to group pressure had activity in the part of the brain the shows emotional salience. From this Berns concluded that group pressure actually causes people to change their perception of reality whereas those who resist group pressure experience emotional discomfort. It isn’t that they know they are giving the wrong answer; they believe their answer is actually correct.

The results of these studies are astonishing: social pressure often causes people to change their picture of reality, and those who resist social pressure are emotionally upset. This study points to the fact that much of reality is a social construct. The reality we see is filtered through the perceptions of others. Many times it isn’t that we see one thing and say it is another, in order to fit in. More disturbingly, we believe that we see is reality while in may very well be the accretion of the perceptions of others. While there is a strong biological basis for seeing reality for what it is objectively (we would kill ourselves otherwise), what we come to believe to be objectively true is also a function of the perceptions of others.

Those who aren’t subject to the group perception seem to pay an emotional price for the courage of their convictions.