Posted by Janet Harriett on Feb.08, 2010

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Psychologists have shown time and again that people are easily swayed by all manner of pressures to conform. Famous experiments like the Stanford prison experiment and the Milgram experiment graphically demonstrated that, when confronted with an authority figure or put in a position of authority themselves, people will do things that they otherwise would consider unthinkable.

In the 1950s, social psychologist Solomon Asch devised and published the results of a series of studies on social conformity. His studies found that people tended to go along with the crowd, even when the crowd was obviously wrong. About 1/3 of the participants in his experiment frequently gave the wrong response when others in the group had given the same wrong response, and 75% of participants gave at least one wrong answer under the same circumstances.

So, what does this have to do with health?

Asch’s experiment protocol was intentionally set up with a clear “right” and “wrong” answer to the question. A line is either the same length as the others, or it isn’t, and you can break out a ruler to ascertain the truth. Some of the lines were very obviously longer than the others, making the correct answer obvious to even the most untrained observer. Matters of health and wellness don’t always have clear-cut “right” and “wrong” answers, and our understanding of fitness and nutrition changes from day to day with new discoveries. Organic foods are more nutritious, then they’re not. Eggs raise cholesterol, or not. Work out 30 minutes a day for good health, or maybe 90. Breast is best, or it concentrates environmental toxins. Further complicating matters, optimal health conditions for one person aren’t necessarily optimal health for another. When there is no right or wrong answer, we rely even more on the opinions of those around us to decide what is the most prudent course.

Asch’s experiments showed that people are very susceptible to social conformity, which parents will recognize as “peer pressure.” When surrounded by a group that all says the same thing, people tend to go along with the group. These sorts of echo chambers are easy to find on the Internet. Forums and communities are out there espousing just about every philosophy of health and wellness out there. Dissenters may be branded “trolls” and driven away from the group by the echo chamber of agreed-upon ideas (just try advocating meat on a vegetarian message board!). What’s left is a group that reinforces each others’ beliefs, regardless of the factual basis for those approaches. These groups are also susceptible to confirmation bias, the tendency of people who adamantly believe one thing to discount all evidence to the contrary, no matter how solid.

Since the original experiment, other social psychologists have expanded on Asch’s work to see just what the limits of social conformity pressure are. In a variant of the experiment, another one of the coached participants gave a different answer from the rest of that group. Even when that different answer was also wrong, the pressure to conform to the group’s response dropped dramatically, and the rate of incorrect responses by the person not “in” on the experiment dropped from 32% down to less than 6%.

By surrounding yourself with a multitude of ideas and avoiding echo chambers that advocate only one “proper” way of living, you can lessen the pressures for social conformity. A social circle with a variety of approaches to healthy living keeps your options open for adjusting your own lifestyle to accommodate all of what science knows and learns about human physiology. A mixed group lets you adapt, especially when what works for some doesn’t work for you. Moreover, by speaking up with dissenting opinions, you can be that one person who makes it OK for others in the group to dissent, too.

Personal experience is a powerful ally, but we can’t necessarily even trust our own observations when peer pressure is involved. Debriefed after the Asch experiments, participants who gave incorrect responses justified their responses by citing poor eyesight or another reason that suggested they believed they had judged correctly even when they gave an obviously incorrect response. If everyone around you says that eating this or doing that will have a particular health consequence, you may actually start to see that causality even when the two aren’t connected, or the effect isn’t even really present.

This video demonstrates, with discussion, the Asch experiments:

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Posted under GDM Lifestyle, Living.