YOU ARE CLOSER TO BEING AN INSECT THAN YOU MAY THINK
A summary of the Solomon E. Asch study of 1951
By Jack Bowman 1994 (notes from 2007)
| This was handed out to the audience during the dance sequence of the "Out...Out.. Brief Candle" Performance at the Cleveland Public Theater (Cleveland Performance Art Festival - 1994). On the back was printed "I am giving you this dollar to watch my performance. You are now my economic slave." This back page quote had a dollar taped over it and over that a piece of yellow with black letters "CAUTION" tape. |
Solomon E. Asch, in 1951 did a study of "Opinions and Social Pressure." It was published in Scientific American, 193, page 31-35.
Asch wanted to find out how powerful is our need to conform. Are you truly a free thinking being?
He used vision as the method of determining if we can be made (for the sake of conformity) to say we see something we really don't see. He concluded that if we said that we say something that we really didn't see we had conformed for conformity's sake.
He used different lengths of vertical lines. He ask the participants which lines ere the same length and which were different.
He had some of the group say the wrong answer to see if the test subject (meaning you) would conform.
Each subject participated in several test.
About 75 percent went along with the group at least once. In other words 3 out of 4 people will actually lie to themselves to be accepted socially.
Asch found out that by allowing one of the seven plant subjects (the deceivers) to give the correct answer then the test subject would also give the correct answer 95 percent of the time.
This means that an alternate view point that may be correct is essential for the proper functioning of a culture. The one alternate viewpoint may be the correct one. Without it, 75 percent of you will be misled.
Asch found that as the size of the group increases beyond 7 then conformity levels off.
He found that if the group is your reference group (peer group) your tendency to conform is very strong.
He found that females are much more willing to conform than men.
| While reading this a dozen years after the performance,
I can see that there are among us many members of the Super Organism called
Governed Men. Notice that when Asch allowed just one of the seven plant
subjects to give the correct answer then the test subject would also give
the correct answer 95 percent of the time. This "one plant subject" is the
Artist among us. Suppressing the individual Artist is not wise in a culture.
You can also take this farther and say that the Artists have been suppressed for
so long that we cannot trust our cultural norms. For the performance art
piece of 2006-2007 where the "Artist VS the Super Organism" see the
http://www.retropunkx.com/index.html web site. Jack Bowman, July 2007 email address mailto:dapoets@bright.net |
RETURN TO THE "OUT...OUT...BRIEF CANDLE" PERFORMANCE.