I think the idea of a single-dimensional “dissenter-ness” measure of people requires much more evidence for me to believe it’s a useful model of people’s behavior in very different areas (politics, buying choices, socializing, religion).
People usually follow general rules or strategies of behavior. Reasoning consciously about things takes effort and motivation. Any strategy or heuristic leads to the wrong answer sometimes, and we tend to focus on those cases without considering the more usual successes of the strategy. Also, most strategies aren’t conscious or deliberate, and people often invent wrong rationalizations for their actions that they honestly believe in.
These are all general reasons to be wary of studies showing that “people conform” by testing their behavior in one situation (the Asch test) and then extrapolating to their behavior in another (where they have a reason or desire to be right or to convince others).
Perhaps the people in the study followed a heuristic similar to “I’m asked to do a task; I don’t get paid more if I do it better, so I’ll put it in the minimum reasonable effort; and a great way to do a novel task is to copy whatever that other guy is doing, he seems sure of himself, and if I get it wrong at least I won’t be blamed as much as for a novel error.” Or: “it’s polite to pretend to agree with others about questions that clearly don’t matter in and of themselves; avoid pointless arguments to focus on the important ones.”
I suggest a different experiment: ask the same question as Asch, but tell participants that a monetary prize (large enough that they’d care about it more than the trivial inconvenience of disagreeing with strangers) will be awarded only to those who answer correctly.
I think the idea of a single-dimensional “dissenter-ness” measure of people requires much more evidence for me to believe it’s a useful model of people’s behavior in very different areas (politics, buying choices, socializing, religion).
People usually follow general rules or strategies of behavior. Reasoning consciously about things takes effort and motivation. Any strategy or heuristic leads to the wrong answer sometimes, and we tend to focus on those cases without considering the more usual successes of the strategy. Also, most strategies aren’t conscious or deliberate, and people often invent wrong rationalizations for their actions that they honestly believe in.
These are all general reasons to be wary of studies showing that “people conform” by testing their behavior in one situation (the Asch test) and then extrapolating to their behavior in another (where they have a reason or desire to be right or to convince others).
Perhaps the people in the study followed a heuristic similar to “I’m asked to do a task; I don’t get paid more if I do it better, so I’ll put it in the minimum reasonable effort; and a great way to do a novel task is to copy whatever that other guy is doing, he seems sure of himself, and if I get it wrong at least I won’t be blamed as much as for a novel error.” Or: “it’s polite to pretend to agree with others about questions that clearly don’t matter in and of themselves; avoid pointless arguments to focus on the important ones.”
I suggest a different experiment: ask the same question as Asch, but tell participants that a monetary prize (large enough that they’d care about it more than the trivial inconvenience of disagreeing with strangers) will be awarded only to those who answer correctly.