Custodes Futurifor the advancement of humanity

Social factor, barrier 2 of 6

Conformity and groupthink

Asch (1956) showed many people agree with a group's clearly wrong answer. Janis (1972) described how cohesive groups suppress dissent. Janis's model rests mainly on historical case studies and has limited experimental support (rated C).

Evidence

  • Asch experiments. Judging line lengths alone, people erred under 1% of the time (0.7%). With a unanimous group giving wrong answers, 36.8% of responses conformed, 94 of 123 participants (about 76%) conformed at least once, and 29 of 123 (about 24%) never did (Asch, 1956).
  • One dissenter. When one other person gave the correct answer, conformity dropped to about 5% of trials (Asch, 1956).
  • Checks. The percentages above match Table 3 of the original monograph (123 experimental and 37 control participants) and an independent recalculation. A modern replication found 33% conformity, close to the original 36.8%, though rates vary across cultures and eras (Franzen and Mader, 2023).

Proposed and experimental methods

Methods that are proposed, under trial, approved in some places, or tried and then failed. Each shows a stage label and an evidence rating. A stage label shows how far a method has progressed, not whether it works. The stage labels are explained on the social factor page.

  • Keeping judgments independent or networks decentralized (Early trial, C). In a lab experiment with 144 people, seeing other people's estimates narrowed the spread of answers without making the group more accurate, and raised confidence (Lorenz et al., 2011). A later randomized experiment found that in decentralized networks, where no single person dominates, sharing estimates made group estimates reliably more accurate, while in centralized networks group error became more likely to rise (Becker et al., 2017). In practice this means collecting independent judgments before discussion and limiting the pull of central figures. No field test in real organizations was found in this review.
  • Genuine dissent rather than assigned devil's advocates (Early trial, C). Builds on "Cognitive biases" in the psychological factors (premortems and AI devil's advocates). In laboratory groups, a member who truly disagreed led to more and better solutions than a devil's advocate in each of three role-play versions tested, which suggests that role-play has difficulty reproducing the effect of real dissent (Nemeth et al., 2001). This argues for protecting and recruiting people who actually disagree, not only assigning the role.
  • Protected dissent channels (Approved but not scaled, C). The U.S. State Department's Dissent Channel lets staff send dissenting policy views directly to the Secretary and senior officials, and authors are "expressly protected from any penalty, reprisal, or recrimination" (Gill and Epstein, 2017). From 1972 to 2017 it received an average of almost nine messages a year (Berndt and Holzer, 2023). A Congressional Research Service review found that publicly known messages appear to rarely affect policy, citing the 1971 Blood telegram and dissents on Syria and the 2017 travel ban as cases that did not change policy (Gill and Epstein, 2017). No outcome evaluation was found.
  • Failed: fixing NASA's decision culture after Challenger (Failed or reversed, B). The board that investigated the 2003 loss of the space shuttle Columbia found organizational barriers that "stifled professional differences of opinion" (CAIB, 2003) and concluded that "the causes of the institutional failure responsible for Challenger have not been fixed," 17 years after the 1986 Challenger accident (Congressional Research Service, 2003). It called for an independent technical authority with full control over specifications and requirements, separate from schedule and budget management (CAIB, 2003).

Sources cited on this page

  1. Asch, S. E. (1956). Studies of independence and conformity: I. A minority of one against a unanimous majority. Psychological Monographs, 70(9), Whole No. 416, 1-70. DOI A Strong: for the laboratory effect, B for real-world generalization
  2. Janis, I. L. (1972). Victims of Groupthink. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. C Limited
  3. Becker, J., Brackbill, D., & Centola, D. (2017). Network dynamics of social influence in the wisdom of crowds. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(26), E5070-E5076. link B Moderate
  4. Berndt, S., & Holzer, H. (2023, December). The State Department Dissent Channel: History and impact. The Foreign Service Journal. American Foreign Service Association. link C Limited
  5. Gill, C. R., & Epstein, S. B. (2017, April 7). The U.S. Department of State's "Dissent Channel" (CRS In Focus IF10631). Congressional Research Service. link B Moderate
  6. Lorenz, J., Rauhut, H., Schweitzer, F., & Helbing, D. (2011). How social influence can undermine the wisdom of crowd effect. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(22), 9020-9025. link C Limited
  7. Nemeth, C., Brown, K., & Rogers, J. (2001). Devil's advocate versus authentic dissent: Stimulating quantity and quality. European Journal of Social Psychology, 31(6), 707-720. link C Limited

Every source for this factor is listed on the social factor page.