Thinking about the "Asch conformity experiments" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments and https://www.britannica.com/topic/conformity )

In 1951 the experiments showed that in about 35% of responses a test person sided with the main (actor) group in giving the wrong answer although the test person knew it was the wrong answer.

This is seen as an example how conformity puts pressure on individual persons.

An important part of the setting is that before the actor group started to give wrong answers there had been three rounds of questions in which the actor group together with the test person gave the correct answer. Only after the thrird round did the actor group start "acting weirdly" to which the test person conformed in about 35% of all cases.

What the accounts in WP & EB omit is that there *first* had been a setting of *trust* ("we share the the same perception") which was *then* altered and "abused". Had the actor group acted "weirdly" (in the perception of the test person) right from the start, the amount of cases in which the test person still agreed to the actor group wrong answer would have been far lower than 35%.

Thus what the Asch experiments showed was not that people tend to succumb to conformity pressure, but that they want to avoid disagreeing once a relation of trust has been established.

Pretty weird that apparently this distinction didn't find more attention.

#talkingtomyselflettingyoulisten