Independence: One-Part Sociality and another Dissenting Voice
- 17 hours ago
- 5 min read
In 1955, a social psychologist named Solomon Asch published the results of a simple experiment. He brought small groups of college students together and showed them two cards. One displayed a single vertical line. The other displayed three lines of noticeably different lengths. The task was simply to identify which of the three matched the first. Under ordinary circumstances, when alone and undistracted, people got the answer right more than 99 percent of the time. But Asch’s study was seeking to know something more than whether people could judge the length of a line; he wanted to know what might happen to the judgment of individuals when they were aware that other people expressed a different view.
The set-up of the study was designed around a deception. There was only one actual subject in each group. Everyone else had been instructed by Asch to sometimes give the same obviously incorrect answer. Suddenly, the participant faced a peculiar problem: believe what they could see with their own eyes or reckon with what everyone else in the room appeared to see. Across the experiment, participants went along with the incorrect majority in 36.8 percent of the critical judgments. But the familiar lesson about conformity is not the part that interests me most. Asch created a situation in which two ordinarily useful sources of information came into conflict—what I perceive and what other people appear to perceive.
Asch did not ask people to judge something ambiguous. These were not questions of taste, interpretation, politics, or values. The lines were deliberately easy to distinguish; and again, participants almost never made mistakes when they were judging them without the pressure of a unanimous majority. Asch’s study created clarity first and then introduced others; and this is what’s most interesting to me…
We need other human beings to understand the world, and yet—that very sociality also creates conditions in which the perceptions of others can begin to compete with our own. There’s something fascinating to me about that tension. We humans have way more confidence in our individual intelligence than is warranted, but the truth is that none of us experiences enough of the world to understand it entirely on our own. Other people help us test our perceptions against something beyond ourselves. Others can know things we don’t and notice notice what we miss. The experiences of others can reveal the limits of our experience and help us reconsider opinions and conclusions that deserve reconsideration. Being influenced by other people is not a defect in human reasoning. We are a profoundly social species, and it’s part of being human.
But Asch was interested in what happens when the information coming from other people contradicts something we have good reason to believe we know? The study sought to shed light on the cognitive and emotional experience of that contradiction.
In the interviews that followed the experiment, some participants tried to find an explanation that would allow their own perception and the group's perception to coexist. Maybe, they proposed, the angle or distance of their physical position in the room affected what they saw? They searched for an objective explanation for the discrepancy. But as the disagreement persisted, the contradiction became harder to resolve. Some began to wonder whether something was wrong with their eyesight or their judgment. They questioned themselves, their own discerning view of the matter.
And yet the evidence of their own perception was still there. They saw what they saw.
"I was sure they were wrong, but not sure I was right."
That sentiment reflects something more complicated than just conformity. The group had not necessarily replaced the individual’s perception, but it did destabilize their confidence under the authority of the group’s expressed perception.
When persistent social disagreement causes humans to distrust their own capacity to perceive and judge, it can negatively affect their self-esteem. I don’t mean self-esteem here as simply feeling good about oneself. I mean the esteem one hold for their own capacities—the belief that one’s own perception deserves consideration, that one’s judgment has standing, that one can make sense of what I encounter. That kind of esteem contributes to self-efficacy, to the belief that one can act effectively and competently in the world.
What makes Asch's findings even more striking is that nobody had to bully the participants into this condition. The members of the majority didn’t ridicule, threaten, or even challenge the subject. Their influence came largely from the apparent certainty and unanimity of the group. The participants reported hoping that somebody else would give the answer they was seeing. They wanted some reassurance that the reality they were experiencing existed beyond themselves, and that helps explain the power of the dissenting voice. When Asch altered the experiment so that the majority was no longer unanimous, conformity dropped sharply. The dissenting voice didn’t have to settle the question of reality for the participant; just their presence changed the social conditions under which the participant could consider their own perception.
My greatest takeaway from Ash’s study is about the courage to call it as one sees it. Courage isn’t the absence of fear. That’s a worrisome misconception. Courage requires fear. To be unafraid could very well be an act of pure stupidity, or recklessness, or naivety, or plain ignorance. Courage is the willingness to act in the presence of fear, and for social beings like us Sapiens, dissent can carry real social risk. The person who speaks against an apparent consensus may risk embarrassment, isolation, ridicule, or (worst of all for many of us) the possibility of being revealed to be wrong in public. Those risks are real. But so is the empowering effect of dissent. A dissenting voice can do more than express an independent judgment. It can create space for someone else to exercise theirs. One person's willingness to say, "That’s not what I see," can restore another person's permission to take seriously what they see. Sometimes saying what we see is not only an act of independence. It may be the thing that makes independence more possible for somebody else.
There's a fine line I’m taking here because I do believe that not everyone is obligated to share investment in every social issue. In some (maybe most) situations we humans encounter, it’s super appropriate to have no opinion or binding belief. But the profound challenge is to participate fully in a social world without surrendering the esteem for our own capacity to perceive, judge, and contribute to it. We need the humility to recognize that other people may see what we cannot see, and enough self-efficacy to recognize that we may sometimes see what they cannot. And perhaps, we also need to understand the responsibility that comes with dissent. It’s of little use to the species for you to feel strongly about your beliefs without the effort to understand the beliefs of others. And it’s a default on a social responsibility to withhold your participation in the social-belief-exchange.
So in conclusion, if you’re thinking that the moral of this story is to "have the courage to think for yourself," I would urge you to reach for something more enlightening. Thinking for ourselves is important, but none of us actually thinks by ourselves. We are social creatures. We depend upon other people to expand, test, challenge, and sometimes correct our understanding of the world. Our cognition extends and is distributed through our sociality. The reasonable goal isn’t to become impervious to the perceptions of others. That wouldn’t make us more thoughtful—it would make us less capable of learning.
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