Peer pressure: the sequel

Not everything in Susan Cain's Quiet is reassuring. Apparently, between 1951 and 1956, a psychologist named Solomon Asch conducted a series of experiments on peer pressure, and showed that by planting actors who confidently volunteered wrong answers in groups of people he could get those groups to shift away from 95% accurate observations to a mere 25% correct observations.

But until the advent of the fMRI, no-one quite understood what was going on with those shifts. Yes, it was horrifying that 75% of the people gave what they knew to be wrong answers in response to peer pressure. But why did they conform with the group? Was it just to go along with the group because they weren't sure? Were they pretending in order to gain favor? In 2005 an Emory University neuroscientist decided to conduct an updated version of Asch's study, using the fMRI to watch participants' brains as they made their choices under the influence of the planted actors.

And what they discovered was that most of the volunteers went along with the group because they actually thought they had arrived serendipitously at the same answer: they were actually completely unaware of how much their peers had influenced them: the group had literally changed their perceptions. The biological imperative to fit in is apparently so strong that it can actually change what and how we see without our even being aware of it -- and those few participants who were able to resist groupthink showed heightened activity in the part of the brain associated with fear of rejection.

To me this helps explain not only mass hysteria phenomena like Nazi Germany and Jonestown but also a lot of what we're seeing on the political front in today's America. In a world where people's sense of connectedness depends more and more upon what they see on their computer screens, cyber-bullying becomes possible on an ever-grander scale. And don't those people who are somehow able to think independently despite group pressure become increasingly important to the future of our society? In such a world it seems to me to be more important than ever to work to maintain a healthy connection to Divine Wisdom, to That Which Is Larger Than Ourselves, if we are not to succumb to the individual ego's desperate need to conform. 

But I suppose there are those who could say that opinion -- that meditation is a way of staying in touch with some sort of grander truth than our own -- is a sort of mass hysteria of its own. It is, I think, a question of what is absolute truth, if there is such a thing, and or where we might find it, a question that has troubled mankind since long before Plato -- who claimed, incidentally, that absolute truth existed, but that truth on earth was merely a shadow of great forms of absolute truth existing in the universe. 

Many, of course, believe in relative truths, where facts may vary depending on the circumstances. Perhaps that's what this study was addressing.  But given that the students were looking a simple geometric problems -- is that line the same length as this one -- we could perhaps assume one answer was right and the rest were wrong.  It's an intriguing conundrum.  Mostly I want to be conscious of the ways my assumptions reflect those of my peers rather than stuff I can really know or believe.