conformity [cc]
It's a subject psychologists have been investigating for the better part of a century. In this video, I wanted to share a couple of the old pioneering studies in this area, plus a recent neurological study that offers surprising ideas on just how deeply we're affected by group opinion. I'll end with some personal observations, and an invitation. In 1935, in his study of social influences, Sherif made use of a phenomenon called the autokinetic effect. This is where a stationary point of light in a completely dark room will appear to move. This happens because the eye makes tiny, involuntary movements all the time. In a well-lit room with clear reference points, our brain compensates for these involuntary movements, so that the world appears stationary. But in a totally dark room, we've got no frame of reference to tell our brain whether it's our eye that moved, or the point of light. Sherif asked individual subjects to estimate how far the point of light moved. When ...