In 1951, a psychologist at Swarthmore College named Solomon Asch devised a now-classic experiment.65 He showed groups of eight participants a card with one line on the left and three lines of varying length on the right (figure 5). Their task was to identify which line on the right was as long as the line on the left. Unbeknownst to his subjects, seven members of the group were confederates who were all instructed to choose the same wrong line. For example, in figure 5, they might all, incorrectly, choose c instead of a. The subject, made to answer last, then had a choice: he or she could
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