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How a '50s psychology experiment can explain the Democratic primaries.
By Duncan Watts
Posted Tuesday, Feb. 24, 2004, at 12:49 PM PT
Barring a miraculous comeback by Sen. John Edwards, Sen. John Kerry will win the Democratic presidential nomination�despite the fact that most Democratic voters know little about him and don't like him very much. A few weeks before the Iowa caucuses, Kerry's campaign seemed dead, but then he unexpectedly won Iowa, then New Hampshire, and then primary after primary. How did this happen?
One answer may be found in a series of psychology experiments conducted at Princeton University in the 1950s. Princeton social psychologist Solomon Asch showed a room of participants a series of slides displaying sets of vertical lines. Two of these lines were clearly the same length, while the others were obviously very different. The subjects were then given the seemingly trivial task of identifying which pair of lines were the same. But there was a trick: Everyone in the room except for one person had been instructed beforehand to give the same incorrect answer. The real subject of the experiment was the lone unwitting participant, and the real test was of an individual's ability to disagree with his or her peers.
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There's more, including a fairly nice discussion of hindsight bias.
Paul Smith
Alverno College
Milwaukee
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