So I'm going through the sequences (in AI to Zombies) and I get to the bit about Asch's Conformity Experiment.

 

It's a good bit of writing, but I mostly pass by without thinking about it too much.  I've been taught about the experiment before, and while Eliezer's point of whether or not the subjects were behaving rationally is interesting, it kind of got swallowed up by his discussion of lonely dissent, which I thought was more engaging.

 

Later, after I'd passed the section on cult attractors and got into the section on letting go, a thought occurred to me, something I'd never actually thought before.

 

Eliezer notes:

 

Three-quarters of the subjects in Asch's experiment gave a "conforming" answer at least once.  A third of the subjects conformed more than half the time.

 

That answer is surprising.  It was surprising to me the first time I learned about the experiment, and I think it's surprising to just about everyone the first time they hear it.  Same thing with a lot of the psychology surrounding heuristics and biases, actually.  Forget the Inquisition - no one saw the Stanford Prison Experiment coming.

 

Here's the thought I had:  Why was that result so surprising to me?

 

I'm not an expert in history, but I know plenty of religious people.  I've learned about the USSR and China, about Nazi Germany and Jonestown.  I have plenty of available evidence of times where people went along with things they wouldn't have on their own.  And not all of them are negative.  I've gone to blood drives I probably wouldn't have if my friends weren't going as well.

 

When I thought about what my prediction would be, had I been asked what percentage of people I thought would dissent before being told, I think I would have guessed that more than 80% of subject would consistently dissent.  If not higher.

 

And yet that isn't what the experiment shows, and it isn't even what history shows.  For every dissenter in history, there have to be at least a few thousand conformers.  At least.  So why did I think dissent was the norm?

 

I notice that I am confused.

 

So I decide to think about it, and my brain immediately spits out: you're an American in an individualistic culture.  Hypothesis: you expect people to conform less because of the culture you live in/were raised in.  This begs the question: have their been cross-cultural studies done on Asch's Conformity Experiment?  Because if people in China conform more than people in America, then how much people conform probably has something to do with culture.

 

A little googling brings up a 1996 paper that does a meta-analysis on studies that repeated Asch's experiments, either with a different culture, or at a later date in time.  Their findings:

 

The results of this review can be summarized in three parts.

First, we investigated the impact of a number of potential moderator variables, focusing just on those studies conducted in the United States where we were able to investigate their relationship with conformity, free of any potential interactions with cultural variables. Consistent with previous research, conformity was significantly higher, (a) the larger the size of the majority, (b) the greater the proportion of female respondents, (c) when the majority did not consist of out-group members, and (d) the more ambiguous the stimulus. There was a nonsignificant tendency for conformity to be higher, the more consistent the majority. There was also an unexpected interaction effect: Conformity was higher in the Asch (1952b, 1956) paradigm (as was expected), but only for studies using Asch's (1956) stimulus materials; where other stimulus materials were used (but where the task was also judging which of the three comparison lines was equal to a standard), conformity was higher in the Crutchfield (1955) paradigm. Finally, although we had expected conformity to be lower when the participant's response was not made available to the majority, this variable did not have a significant effect.

The second area of interest was on changes in the level of conformity over time. Again the main focus was on the analysis just using studies conducted in the United States because it is the changing cultural climate of Western societies which has been thought by some to relate to changes in conformity. We found a negative relationship. Levels of conformity in general had steadily declined since Asch's studies in the early 1950s. We did not find any evidence for a curvilinear trend (as, e.g., Larsen, 1982, had hypothesized), and the direction was opposite to that predicted by Lamb and Alsifaki (1980).

The third and major area of interest was in the impact of cultural values on conformity, and specifically differences in individualism-collectivism. Analyses using measures of cultural values derived from Hofstede (1980, 1983), Schwartz (1994), and Trompenaars (1993) revealed significant relationships confirming the general hypothesis that conformity would be higher in collectivist cultures than in individualist cultures. That all three sets of measures gave similar results, despite the differences in the samples and instruments used, provides strong support for the hypothesis. Moreover, the impact of the cultural variables was greater than any other, including those moderator variables such as majority size typically identified as being important factors.

Cultural values, it would seem, are significant mediators of response in group pressure experiments.

 

So, while the paper isn't definitive, it (and the papers it draws from) show reasonable evidence that there is a cultural impact on how much people conform.

 

I thought about that for a little while, and then I realized that I hadn't actually answered my own question.

 

My confusion stems from the disparity between my prediction and reality.  I'm not wondering about the effect culture has on conformity (the territory), I'm wondering about the effect culture has on my prediction of conformity (the map).

 

In other words, do people born and raised in a culture with collectivist values (China, for example) or who actually do conform beyond the norm (people who are in a flying-saucer cult, or the people actually living in a compound) expect people to conform more than I did?  Is their map any different from mine?

 

Think about it - with all the different cult attractors, it probably never feels as though you are vastly conforming, even if you are in a cult.  The same can probably be said for any collectivist society.  Imagine growing up in the USSR - would you predict that people would conform with any higher percentage than someone born in 21st century America?  If you were raised in an extremely religious household, would you predict that people would conform as much as they do?  Less?  More?

 

How many times have I agreed with a majority even when I knew they probably weren't right, and never thought of it as "conformity"?  It took a long time for my belief in god to finally die, even when I could admit that I just believed that I believed.  And why did I keep believing (or keep trying to/saying that I believed)?

 

Because it's really hard to actually dissent.  And I wasn't even lonely.

 

So why was my map that wrong?

 

What background process or motivated reasoning or...whatever caused that disparity?

 

One thing that, I think, contributes, is that I was generalizing from fictional evidence.  Batman comes far more readily to my mind than Jonestown.  For that matter, Batman comes more readily to my mind than the millions of not-Batmans in Gotham city.  I was also probably not being moved by history enough.  For every Spartacus, there are at minimum hundreds of not-Spartuses, no matter what the not-Spartacuses say when asked.

 

But to predict that three-quarters of subjects would conform at least once seems to require a level of pessimism beyond even that.  After all, there were no secret police in Asch's experiment; no one had emptied their bank accounts because they thought the world was ending.

 

Perhaps I'm making a mistake by putting myself into the place of the subject of the experiment.  I think I'd dissent, but I would predict that most people think that, and most people conformed at least once.  I'm also a reasonably well-educated person, but that didn't seem to help the college students in the experiment.

 

Has any research been done on people's prediction of their own and other's conformity, particularly across cultures or in groups that are "known" for their conformity (communism, the very religious, etc.)?  Do people who are genuine dissenters predict that more people will dissent than people who genuinely conform?

 

I don't think this is a useless question.  If you're starting a business that offers a new solution to a problem where solutions already exist, are you overestimating how many people will dissent and buy your product?

As many of you may be aware, the UK general election took place yesterday, resulting in a surprising victory for the Conservative Party. The pre-election opinion polls predicted that the Conservatives and Labour would be roughly equal in terms of votes cast, with perhaps a small Conservative advantage leading to a hung parliament; instead the Conservatives got 36.9% of the vote to Labour's 30.4%, and won the election outright.

There has already been a lot of discussion about why the polls were wrong, from methodological problems to incorrect adjustments. But perhaps more interesting is the possibility that the polls were right! For example, Survation did a poll on the evening before the election, which predicted the correct result (Conservatives 37%, Labour 31%). However, that poll was never published because the results seemed "out of line." Survation didn't want to look silly by breaking with the herd, so they just kept quiet about their results. Naturally this makes me wonder about the existence of other unpublished polls with similar readings.

This seems to be a case of two well know problems colliding with devastating effect. Conformity bias caused Survation to ignore the data and go with what they "knew" to be the case (for which they have now paid dearly). And then the file drawer effect meant that the generally available data was skewed, misleading third parties. The scientific thing to do is to publish all data, including "outliers," both so that information can change over time rather than be anchored, and to avoid artificially compressing the variance. Interestingly, the exit poll, which had a methodology agreed beforehand and was previously committed to be published, was basically right.

This is now the third time in living memory that opinion polls have been embarrassingly wrong about the UK general election. Each time this has lead to big changes in the polling industry. I would suggest that one important scientific improvement is for polling companies to announce the methodology of a poll and any adjustments to be made before the poll takes place, and commit to publishing all polls they carry out. Once this became the norm, data from any polling company that didn't follow this practice would be rightly seen as unreliable by comparison.

A rather good 10 minute YouTube video presenting the results of several papers relevant to how conformity affects our thinking:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrNIuFrso8I

 

The papers mentioned are:

Sherif, M. (1935). A study of some social factors in perception. Archives of Psychology, 27(187), pp.17-22.

Asch, S.E. (1951). Effects of group pressure upon the modification and distortion of judgment. In H. Guetzkow (ed.) Groups, leadership and men. Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Press.
Asch, S.E. (1955). Opinions and social pressure. Scientific American, 193(5), pp.31-35.

Berns, G.S., Chappelow, J., Zink, C.F., Pagnoni, G., Martin-Skurski, M.E., and Richards, J. (2005) 'Neurobiological Correlates of Social Conformity and Independence During Mental Rotation' Biological Psychiatry, 58(3), pp.245-253.

Weaver, K., Garcia, S.M., Schwarz, N., & Miller, D.T. (2007) Inferring the popularity of an opinion from its familiarity: A repetitive voice can sound like a chorus. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(5), 821-833.

 

What techniques do other posters, here on LessWrong, use to monitor and counter these effects in their lives?

The video also lists some of the advantages to a society of having a certain amount of this effect in place.   Does anyone here conform too little?

I believe this may be a good addition to the cognitive bias literature:

Following the Crowd: Brain Substrates of Long-Term Memory Conformity

1. Micah Edelson^1,*, 
2. Tali Sharot², 
3. Raymond J. Dolan², 
4. Yadin Dudai¹

¹Department of Neurobiology, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel.

1. ²Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, Institute of Neurology, University College London, London, UK.

ABSTRACT

Human memory is strikingly susceptible to social influences, yet we know little about the underlying mechanisms. We examined how socially induced memory errors are generated in the brain by studying the memory of individuals exposed to recollections of others. Participants exhibited a strong tendency to conform to erroneous recollections of the group, producing both long-lasting and temporary errors, even when their initial memory was strong and accurate. Functional brain imaging revealed that social influence modified the neuronal representation of memory. Specifically, a particular brain signature of enhanced amygdala activity and enhanced amygdala-hippocampus connectivity predicted long-lasting but not temporary memory alterations. Our findings reveal how social manipulation can alter memory and extend the known functions of the amygdala to encompass socially mediated memory distortions.

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6038/108.full

http://ifile.it/v76wsi5

A new variation on the Asch conformity experiment was recently published. The experiment was performed in Japan and used polarizing glasses to show different lines to different people in the same room, so that the subjects had to disagree with others they actually knew, and who genuinely believed that they were answering correctly. The study found that women conformed by giving a wrong answer about a third of the time, but men did not.

Learned about this via Ben Goldacre's blog.