In the actual experiment, however, there was a hitch: only one of the people in the room was really a subject. The others were working for Asch (“stooges,” in psych-experiment parlance), and, per his instructions, after the first few flashcards, they all began to give the same wrong answer. The consequences for the lone authentic subject were striking. Three-quarters of them gave the wrong answer at least once, and one-quarter gave the wrong answer for half or more of the flashcards. On average, the subjects’ error rate rose from under 1 percent when acting independently to almost 37 percent
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