In a February article in the online magazine Slate, Columbia University Professor Duncan Watts exhumed the work of the late Princeton social psychologist Solomon Asch to explain what Watts called the ...

At Swarthmore College in 1951, 50 students were placed in a room and charged with matching the length of two vertical lines (Asch, 1951). Seven confederates gave the wrong answer for the lion’s share ...

You’re in a room, participating in what you were told is a visual perception experiment, and everyone around you insists that two unequal lines are the same length. You feel confused, sick, and ...

Exactly what is the effect of the opinions of others on our own? In other words, how strong is the urge toward social conformity? The question is approached by means of some unusual experiments ...