The pioneer in social psychology, the Polish-American psychologist Solomon Asch , became world famous in the 1950s by demonstrating how people adjust their opinions based on what others think. That is, as he concluded, we are infected by the opinion of others, and we do it to integrate ourselves socially.
In the same way, there are also traits or virtues that we adopt as our own, copying them from others, as Nemeth and Cynthia Chiles demonstrated in an already classic study decades later.
The study was a variation on the one conducted by Asch. If this was the verification of how we conform to general opinions, that was the verification that if one demonstrates the courage and courage to stand out from the group, then that value can be infected, causing a greater number of dissidents .
In the study, an individual was put in a group with three other people. A series of twenty plates was then shown on which each member was asked what color they were . Since they were all blue, they all answered that they were blue, all twenty times. There was total unanimity.
The members of this group then dissolved and became part of other groups. Here the other three members were accomplices of the researcher, so when twenty red plates were presented, the majority responded that the plates were orange. Sometimes the plates looked more orange than red, but they were clearly red. For this reason, given that the majority bet on red, as Asch had already shown, the subjects ended up surrendering and yielding to the pressure of that majority opinion .
The interesting thing came when, when the experiment was repeated from the beginning, another accomplice was introduced into the first group, who was shown the blue plates. This accomplice replied that the plates were green. He stood by his conviction . Although the other participants were puzzled by this wrong answer, they also perceived something else: that the individual was brave and independent enough to give his opinion, even if it did not coincide with the general opinion. It was a kind of Quixote.
For that reason, when the members of this new group were divided into groups that had to undergo the second test, that of the red plates, they were less likely to adapt to the majority opinion. The slides were red, not orange, and it didn’t matter so much that everyone said they were orange. It just seemed that this first show of courage and independence had inspired the subjects. Somehow they had become infected with those quixotic virtues , and now they displayed them more firmly in front of the group.
This is how the researchers concluded that “exposing oneself to a dissenting minority opinion, even if that opinion is wrong, contributes to independence.”
These findings are particularly important to understand what social dynamics are being forged in digital social networks . On Twitter or Facebook, for example, algorithms tend to make the people and opinions that most coincide with our initial opinion more visible to us, so we are less and less likely to witness brave and dissenting ideas, even if they are wrong.
This could be favoring a kind of ideological echo chamber in which we not only adapt more easily to the majority feeling, but it is increasingly difficult for us to raise a divergent opinion, ceasing to be part of the gregarious mass.
