5.17.2005 |  Asch

posted by Jon
08:40 | SAY SOMETHING |



Last night I went to class expecting to learn very little. I’ve taken Organizational Behavior before (the undergrad version), and all the terms are familiar to me. The professor has an agonizing sense of humor (including one very bad hemi anecdote), and deviates from the text just often enough to keep me from falling asleep.

Last night was exactly that way except for one small thing. The professor began the topic of group behavior by drawing on the board 4 lines: X, A, B, and C.



During the 1950s, a guy named Solomon Asch developed an experiment to measure group conformity. In each experiment, a group of people were shown the 4 lines and told that they would be asked which of the 3 lines — A, B, and C — was equal to line X in length. In some cases they were told to pick line A, in others, line B.

A new and uninitiated person would be brought into the room, and the question would be asked each member of the group in front of him, with each member choosing the same obviously wrong answer. When the question was finally asked the subject, he would almost always agree with the rest of the group, consciously violating what he knew to be the actual correct answer.

When the lines remained on a board in the room, each new person was more likely to disagree with the incorrect answer given by the rest of the group. These individuals had a constant reinforcement of truth right there in front of them. When the lines were shown and then quickly removed, the subject was more likely to agree with the group in the end.

This experiment was by far the most interesting piece of information I heard last night, because it seemed to me like a good example of the power of sin.

When I am constantly told by the world that something is right and good, and I know it’s anything but those things, the temptation can be very strong to not argue with the world and sometimes even agree in the way that I act and behave. It’s hard to go against what every single other person in the room believes. It’s even harder for Christians because we face ridicule and sometimes worse when we say what God teaches us to believe.

If I had constant reinforcement of my beliefs — reading the Bible often — it would make it much easier to keep myself in check and actually have the guts to not give in. Just because the whole world says something doesn’t make it so. I think I got more out of that lesson than the rest of my class did.