You might have heard of the Miligram Experiment. 

Many of you will be familiar with the Asch experiment.  Which of the lines are the same as line X (on the left, in the picture above)? The obvious answer is B. It is unambiguous. No one could have gotten this wrong.

Er, but what if you were in a room and everyone else said C? Would you still be convinced that the answer is B?

The Asch experiment puts participants with a room of 5 other people - actors planted by the experimenter to give the wrong answer. The experimenter then asks a series of 12 questions, similar to the one above, with obvious, indisputable answers. What result did Asch find?

• 50% of people gave the same wrong answer as the others on more than half of the trials.

• 76% of participants denied their own senses at least once, following the blatantly false judgement on at least one of the 12 trials.

• 5% always conformed with the majority incorrect opinion (I presume we all have someone like this in our lives)

Remember the ringing bell in the clinic experiment earlier? 
Copying others comes naturally to us. As babies, we learnt by copying. We minimised decision-making by copying: for example, we all brush our teeth when we wake up, and we brush our teeth in a similar manner. When the iPhone first came out, people from different cultures all over the world wanted one, even though most never went beyond the basic functions which many other smart phones provide. Copying others and conforming to norms are not necessarily bad.

But We all know that humans are natural born conformers – we copy each other’s dress sense, ways of talking and attitudes, often without a second thought. But exactly how far does this conformity go? Do you think it is possible you would deny unambiguous information from your own senses just to conform with other people? 

Have a look at the figure below. Compare the line on the left with the three lines on the right: A, B & C. Which of these three lines is the same length as the lonesome line on the left?

It’s obviously C. And yet in a classic psychology experiment conducted in the 1950s, 76% of people denied their own senses at least once, choosing either A or B. What kind of strong-arm psychological pressure tactics made them do this?

The fascinating thing about this experiment was that its creator, renowned psychologist Solomon Asch, set out to prove the exact opposite. A previous experiment by Muzafer Sherif (see his well-known Robbers Cave experiment) had found that when people were faced with making a judgement on an ambiguous test, they used other people’s judgements as a reference point.

This makes perfect sense. If I’m not sure about something, I’ll check with someone else. But this is only when I’m not sure. The situation is quite different when I have unambiguous information, such as when I can clearly see the answer myself. Other people’s judgement should then have no effect – or at least that’s what Asch thought.

The experiment

To test his theory he brought male undergraduates, one at a time, into a room with eight other people who were passed off as fellow participants (Asch, 1951). They were then shown three lines with another for comparison, similar to the figure above. Participants were asked to call out which line – A, B or C – was the same length as the reference line. This procedure was repeated 12 times with participants viewing variations of the above figure.

What the participants didn’t realise was that all the other people sat around the table were in on the game. They were all confederates who had been told by the experimenter to give the wrong answer. On half of the trials they called out the line that was too short, and on the other half the line that was too long.

The real experimental participant, who knew nothing of this, was actually the sixth to call out their answer after five other confederates of the experimenter had given the wrong answer.

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• Over all the trials the average conformity rate was 33%.

Intrigued as to why participants had gone along with the majority, Asch interviewed them after the experiment. Their answers are probably very familiar to all of us:

• All felt anxious, feared disapproval from others and became self-conscious.

• Most explained they saw the lines differently to the group but then felt the group was correct.

• Some said they went along with the group to avoid standing out, although they knew the group was wrong.

• A small number of people actually said they saw the lines in the same way as the group.

The findings of this study were so startling they inspired many psychologists to investigate further. Here are a few of their findings:

• Asch himself found that if the participant only had to write down their answer (while others called theirs out) conformity was reduced to 12.5%.

• Deutsch and Gerard (1955) still found conformity rates of 23% even in conditions of high anonymity and high certainty about the answer.

• Those who are ‘conformers’ typically have high levels of anxiety, low status, high need for approval and often authoritarian personalities.

• Cultural differences are important in conformity. People from cultures which view conformity more favourably – typically Eastern societies – are more likely to conform.

Looks like 2 different animals huh? The fox on the left - wild, fierce, aggressive, feral; the fox on the right - cute, friendly, shy even. 
Surely most of us will prefer the one on the right.

And guess what, nature is able to adapt to our preferences. 

In 1958,  Dmitri Belyaev and his intern Lyudmila Trut travelled to fur farms from Siberia to Moscow to Estonia, and selected 130 foxes (100 vixens and 30 male) who were friendlier and more docile around humans, to be first-generation parents for a breeding experiment. 

When the cubs from these 130 foxes were born, Belyaev and Trut introduced human interaction, hand-feeding and petting (foxes would normally have no human interaction). Cubs which continued to show aggression, even after significant human contact, were discarded (i.e. sadly slaughtered and made into fur coats). The 10% of the second generation that was tamest were used as parents for the third generation; the tamest 10% of the third generation were then bred as parents for the fourth generation, and so on. 
 

By intense selective breeding, an evolutionary process that might have otherwise require several millennia to unfold was compressed into a few decades.  Within 4 generations, the cubs began to behave more like dogs. They wagged their tails and eagerly sought contact with humans. After 40 generations, the foxes were playful, friendly and behaved just like domesticated dogs. The foxes could "read" human cues and respond correctly to gestures or glances. Their vocalisations became different from wild foxes. And most incredibly, their appearance changed dramatically - legs and snout shortened, the jaw and skull grew wider, their tails, just like domesticated dogs and pigs, grew curlier. Remarkably, even they're fur had changed to a lighter, friendlier colour, instead of the more menacing and aggressive black and grey.

In short, they grew cute. 

Isn't it wondrous these foxes that were specifically bred for human interaction evolved not just in behaviour - sure we can imagine that animals can be trained to trust humans and become playful.  But it was more than that - they evolved in appearance for no apparent functional purpose, except to be more attractive to humans.

How does nature know what is attractive to us? 

How could foxes, genetically different, become so much like dogs?

The answer lies in the field of epigenetics - how we can become very different not because of the genes themselves, but because of how genes are expressed based on interaction with the environment. 

You can read more about epigenetics here

You can also read more about the transformation of Mickey Mouse here. While these foxes changes naturally, Mickey Mouse changed by design 

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Christmas Eve, December 1914
World War 1 has raged for several months. It will go on for another 3 years.

At the front-line, German and British soldiers greeted each other daily with bullets and grenades. But with no end to the war in sight, the generals on both sides called for a temporary ceasefire, where men on both sides could collect the bodies of the deceased.

And then something amazing happened. In certain areas, the men who had been trying to kill each other just hours before began to mingle. Even though they spoke different languages, they exchanged greetings, food, and small gifts. That night, they held joint burial ceremonies of their comrades killed by the men beside them, singing Christmas carols in different languages. By the next day, one of the most memorable images of the war emerged - the men from both sides were playing football with one another. They even shared addresses with one another so that they could write or even visit each other after the war, provided they hadn't been killed by the other party. 

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This truce only ended because the generals on both sides realised that part of their armies had become too friendly with one another, and cracked down on discipline to get their sides back to fighting each other. In 1915, there were fewer occurrences of ceasefires - with leaders on both sides wary of what happened in 1914. By 1916, soldiers no longer had any desire to mingle - the war had gotten increasingly bitter with devastating losses to both sides,

Categorisng people based on obvious heuristics is another one of our brain's unconscious preferences (think back on the last 10 people you met, or try observing how you categorise automatically for the new people you will meet).  This categorisation is necessary to help us make sense of the many people we would meet in life, without being overwhelmed by information. One of these categories is "us" vs "them", which explains why you tend to be more wary of people who are a different skin colour, a different religion, wearing the baseball cap of a different team than the one you support - your amygdala lights up, telling you that there is a potential threat of a "them".

But as this example shows, the categorisation of who is "us" and "them" tends to be done very quickly, at the expense of accuracy. Why should this other person be a "them"? Once we consciously review our categorisation, we will realise that for many cases, we had over-generalised. For example, after getting to know friends from a different race, we might realise that they have more in common with us then others who are the same race as us.  

In this case, even in the most brutal of circumstances,  "them" can turn so quickly into "us", with the realisation that even while trying to kill each other, soldiers have a lot in common. They fight for the same cause. They follow orders. They risk their lives for what they believe. 

What is also interesting is our natural adherence to authority. Is there a point in the war, if Germans and Brits can come together in singing and soccer, to learn each other's language, and to enjoy each other's company? Yet soldiers, even having redefined "us" and "them", reversed their definition and went back into killing each other.

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