Offensive Squid

This is a recent study I thought would be fun to share here:

Asch's conformity study without the confederates

With the help of five to eight 'confederates' (research assistants posing as naive participants), Solomon Asch in the 1950s found that when it came to making public judgments about the relative lengths of lines, some people were willing to agree with a majority view that was clearly wrong.

Asch's finding was hugely influential, but a key criticism has been his use of confederates who pretended to believe unanimously that a line was a different length than it really was. They might well have behaved in a stilted, unnatural manner. And attempts to replicate the study could be confounded by the fact that some confederates will be more convincing than others. To solve these problems Kazuo Mori and Miho Arai adapted the MORI technique (Manipulation of Overlapping Rivalrous Images by polarizing filters; pdf), used previously in eye-witness research. By donning filter glasses similar to those used for watching 3-D movies, participants can view the same display and yet see different things.

[...]

Whereas Asch used male participants only, the new study involved both men and women. For women only, the new findings closely matched the seminal research, with the minority participant being swayed by the majority on an average of 4.41 times out of 12 key trials (compared with 3.44 times in the original). However, the male participants in the new study were not swayed by the majority view.

[...]

Interesting, huh? I think it is related to socialization and enculturalization. It would be interesting to do this as a cross cultural study.

So, one thing that happens to me when everyone disagrees with me is that I question my perception. If everyone else were to say that something is one length where I thought it was another, I would wonder about my vision (I am very nearsighted) and also about my perception (maybe something is going on in my brain that is screwing up how I perceive stuff).

I tend to mistrust my perception and try to remain skeptical and agnostic about what I see because I have found in the past that I have often been mistaken about things. Past is often a predictor for the future, hence, huh.

You don't know whether people are lying because you only observe the behavior. You need to do more work to establish interior state.

aside, sometimes it seems you like to describes things in a provocative way as a sort of trolling. do you agree or disagree?

With respect to trolling, I don't think a troll is necessarily someone who wants to win or insult people. Trolling can also be the behavior of trying to get responses. but, I don't mean to over-define it such that "hello" is a troll.

With respect to the lie reactions, both of those sound like likely stories. I bet there are probably even more I haven't thought about. Like, I wonder if you asked later after the stimulus goes away, would someone hear everyone else say something and then confabulate seeing the same thing? (confabulate does not mean lie).

oh ha, I bet you could expose them to stimulus, then do a public recall test, then later try out some recognition memory tests.

If it is the case that we set up a condition in which someone confabulated the answer they agreed on during the public recall task, then in a private recognition task, I wonder if they respond to the actual stimulus with a feeling of familiarity?

obtw, if I were in a group and everyone disagreed, I'd doubt myself more than if there were a few people giving different answers than everyone.

…and in this situation, I wonder how the experiment went? If I walked in to an experiment and they gave me glasses, I would be playing with the glasses and if they looked like diffraction gratings I'd also be grabbing some of the other glasses to rotate the lenses to see if I could get all of the light to block out (because I do this when we go to 3d movies that have those types of glasses). I think I would also blame any weird perception effects on the glasses because clearly there is something that is going to screw up your vision.

re: insulting cultures, or lack thereof. shrug. It may just be your cognitive framing. when I read that blog post on the results I immediately thought of how experiments show (US) women as responding to things along the lines of maintaining harmony as well as thinking that other cultures value harmony more than US culture. given that, we could speculate that the harmony factor has something to do with it and try to vary it to see if it follows.

btw, US culture is obsessed with work when you compare how we work and have holidays vs. some of the other cultures in Europe. it's like we are descended from a bunch of puritans. work work work.

I just spent the weekend doing work related conference stuff, in fact.