Igor Omilaev / Unsplash / Sarah Soryal
Key Takeaways
- Solomon Asch’s famous 1951 experiment showed that the pull to conform to a group can cause us to doubt the evidence right in front of our eyes.
- Today’s online environment intensifies this effect, allowing a small number of loud or coordinated voices to masquerade as true consensus.
- Resisting this illusion requires embracing discomfort — questioning majority opinion, slowing down before signaling agreement, and trusting our own judgment.
It’s the spring of 1951. As the Korean War escalates and the world engages in scandalized debate over Julius and Ethel Rosenberg’s recent conviction for espionage, students at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania are gathering in small groups to take part in what they believe to be a vision test. They’re shown three lines of obviously different lengths and asked which one matches a target line. Unaware that they’re participating in a psychology experiment overseen by the social psychologist Solomon Asch, the subjects don’t realize that everyone else in their group has been instructed to give the wrong answer.
The task is simple — one line clearly matches the target while the other two clearly don’t. Yet when everyone in the room says otherwise, the students begin to doubt what they see. Such is the power of conformity, which Asch had designed the test to measure, that 75% of participants go along with an obviously false consensus at least once. They override their own judgment in the face of certainty from the group.
This was a complex dynamic in 1951; today, it is even more so. Asch’s “majority” is now a cultural force whose atmospheric pressure we endlessly encounter online. Causes célèbres and ideological trends often shift faster than our capacity to gain a deep understanding of the issues involved, yet we’re incentivized to align ourselves with the prevailing view and signal accordingly. Of course, as in Asch’s experiment, the “majority” we react to can be an illusion that causes us to equate the loudest voices with authority.
We inherit our ideas about morality, duty, and truth from the people around us.
Asch watched the immense power of consensus in action, learning that most of us prefer to risk being wrong rather than oppose the majority. His experiment posed a question with no moral or political stakes. When we feel pressured to jump on a bandwagon that does carry moral stakes, we are incentivized to conform to the moral worldview of others. The pressure to agree often works in this quiet, invisible way. There is no overt force or threat, merely the felt vulnerability of setting oneself apart. The discomfort of wondering whether we’ll face consequences for holding the “wrong” view, or for simply refraining from broadcasting the “right” one. Amid all this is the doubt Asch’s students also experienced — how likely is it that we could be right when the majority insists we’re not?
This uneasy place is where the philosopher John Stuart Mill encourages us all to live, if we can bear to. Writing in On Liberty almost a century before Asch told his subjects he was testing their vision rather than their impulse to conform, Mill warned that Victorian society, and societies to come, would share a force toward conformity that he described as “the tyranny of prevailing opinion.” His concern was not the laws but the norms we live by, and the subtle but powerful ways that communities discourage us from deviating.
While On Liberty is often read as a defence of free speech, it’s more fundamentally a defence of independent thought. We inherit our ideas about morality, duty, and truth from the people around us. When we grow up, we gravitate toward social groups and settings that mirror our views and experience implicit pressure to conform to social conventions. This has its benefits — it prevents most of us from taking a video call on speaker in the library — but it limits us, too. Mill worried that in Victorian Britain, as now, we are prone to internalizing the dominant narrative about how best to think and live until our judgment is replaced by imitation. This is what the students at Swarthmore College did when they were shown two lines that didn’t match and insisted that they did.
Mill was concerned that when we avoid the friction of nonconformity, we have no way of knowing whether our views are chosen or passively absorbed from our environment. We may, he wrote, “think [ourselves] free but [we] choose what is customary in preference to [our] inclination until it does not occur to [us] to have any inclination except for what is customary.” Asch’s subjects weren’t especially foolish or cowardly. They were ordinary people responding to pressure by setting aside their agency.
We don’t even have to actively disagree to be interpreted as failing to conform.
Since Asch’s study, psychologists have mapped related biases. Through the false consensus effect, we overestimate the extent to which others share our views. This is our tendency to think “everyone” believes X because the people in our immediate group said they believe X. Pluralistic ignorance describes a “collective illusion” in which a group seems to hold a consensus opinion, even though, in private, most people don’t hold that opinion; they just go along with it because they mistakenly believe everyone else genuinely believes it. Even in the face of outward certainty, we seem to experience private doubt.
Mill’s test of an independent mind involves taking ownership of that doubt and voicing it. We should feel encouraged, he suggests, when our friends look at us skeptically, or the WhatsApp group chat goes quiet when we politely disagree. Friction is not proof that our views are right, but it is proof that they’re being tested. Without this resistance, we can’t know whether our views are really our own, arrived at for sound, defensible reasons. Willingness to expose ourselves to this discomfort — this vulnerability — Mill tells us, is a form of discipline. To understand our beliefs, we should seriously entertain opposing ones.
We don’t even have to actively disagree to be interpreted as failing to conform. One of the most contested forms of nonconformity in our time is something quite different: having no opinion at all. This isn’t passive disengagement, but the deliberate refusal to declare a position on whatever issue is currently dominating the public conversation, whether it’s a geopolitical conflict, a viral controversy, or the black Instagram squares of 2020. This pressure to declare we’re “on side” with whatever is currently capturing the news cycle evokes Asch’s experiment. An implied majority treats silence as complicity, and the result is that we’re encouraged to perform agreement even when we’re uncertain, uninformed, or just exhausted by the constant cycle of one issue being the only moral question that seems to matter before it passes from notice and the “majority” moves on. In an environment like this, choosing not to speak can be as nonconformist, and perhaps even as difficult, as open dissent.
No doubt some of the Asch experiment subjects chuckled on their way out the door, once the ruse had been explained to them. Others, probably, were unsettled by how readily they yielded to “the tyranny of prevailing opinion.” This discomfort, Mill tells us, is good. It is the seed of independent thought.
Tags critical thinkingpsychologySocial media In this article critical thinkingpsychologySocial media Sign up for Big Think on Substack The most surprising and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every week, for free. Subscribe
