Fortunately, we are not the first to question the human tendency to make serious errors of judgment.
Following Wold War Ⅱ, social psychologists attempted to understand how it was that German soldiers were induced to abandon morality and human empathy in order to commit the atrocities of the Holocaust.
What they discovered, to everyone’s surprise and dismay, was that the majority of people can be persuaded to do almost anything.
The first notable experiments were done by Swarthmore psychologist Solomon Asch.
Asch wanted to discover whether people’s tendency to agree with their peers was stronger than their tendency toward indepen– dent thought and rational judgment.
In one of his most famous experiments, Asch assem– bled a dozen or so Swarthmore students and announced that they were taking part in an experiment on visual perception.
He showed them three line segments, and asked each one in turn which line was the longest.
It was an easy task — the correct answer was obvious.
However, Asch had secretly instructed all but the last person, who was the real subject of the experiment, to say that the medium–length line was the longest.
The aim was to see whether the subject would rely on his or her own judgment, or go along with the group.
As it turned out, 70 percent of the subjects caved in to group pressure and said that the medium–length line was the longest.
The conclusion was that most human beings, under conditions that are hardly severe, will follow the crowd, even when the crowd is clearly wrong.
Stanley Milgram, a former student of Asch, took this research a step further.
Milgram wanted to see how much influence an authority figure could wield over the average person.
In his most famous experiment, subjects were put in an artificial situation (although they believed it was real) in which an authority figure — a “scientist” in a white lab coat — instructed them to inflict pain on another person.
In fact, those subjects who followed the instructions to the bitter end had reason to believe they were inflicting serious and even lethal pain on a fellow human being.
Yet, 65 percent of the subjects followed the instructions as given.
We must point out that Milgram selected subjects from all occupations and from various social backgrounds.
They were not hardened criminals, soldiers, or mentally deranged.
They were just average people.
Yet the Mil– gram experiments showed that most people’s tendency to trust and obey authority is so strong that they will shed all personal responsibility, moral training, or creative volition for the sake of following orders.
Taken together, the Milgram and Asch experiments explain much about how societies function.
They tell us we have a natural tendency to let authorities think for us — to let them tell us what is true, moral, or the best course of action.
Moreover, once a leader (or leaders) has convinced a sizable number of their followers to believe something, then our predisposition toward con– formity tends to bring other group members on board.