What others say may change what you see

A new study uses advanced brain-scanning technology to cast light on a topic that psychologists have puzzled over for more than half a cent...

A new study uses advanced brain-scanning technology to cast light on a topic that psychologists have puzzled over for more than half a century: Social conformity. The study was based on a famous series of laboratory experiments from the 1950s by a social psychologist, Dr. Solomon Asch.

In those early studies, the subjects were shown two cards. On the first was a vertical line. On the second were three lines, one of them the same length as that on the first card. Then the subjects were asked to say which two lines were alike, something that most 5-year-olds could answer correctly. But Asch added a twist. Seven other people, in cahoots with the researchers, also examined the lines and gave their answers before the subjects did. And sometimes those confederates intentionally gave the wrong answer. Asch was astonished at what happened next. After thinking hard, three out of four subjects agreed with the incorrect answers given by the confederates at least once. And one in four conformed 50 percent of the time.

Asch, who died in 1996, always wondered about the findings. Did the people who gave in to the group, do so knowing that their answers were wrong? Or did the social pressure actually change their perceptions? The new study tried to find an answer by using functional MRI scanners that can peer into the working brain, a technology not available to Asch.

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The researchers found that social conformity showed up in the brain as activity in regions that are entirely devoted to perception. But independence of judgment — standing up for one’s beliefs — showed up as activity in brain areas involved in emotion, the study found, suggesting that there is a cost for going against the group.

“We like to think that seeing is believing,” said Dr. Gregory Berns, the psychiatrist and neuroscientist at Emory University in Atlanta who led the study. But the study’s findings, he said, show that seeing is believing what the group tells you to believe. The research was published on June 22 in the online edition of Biological Psychiatry.

Dr. Brian Knutson, a neuroscientist at Stanford and an expert on perception, called the study “extremely clever”. “It had all the right controls and is a new contribution, the first to look at social conformity inside a brain magnet,” he said.

The implications of the study’s findings are huge, Berns said. In many areas of society — elections, for example, or jury trials — the accepted way to resolve conflicts between an individual and a group is to invoke the “rule of the majority”.

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There is a sound reason for this: A majority represents the collective wisdom of many people, rather than the judgment of a single person. But the superiority of the group can disappear when the group exerts pressure on individuals, Berns said.

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