Flicking Off the Asch

But what if you know in advance that the other seven are idiots?

The social psychologist Solomon Asch put one research subject in a room with seven trained participants, but told the one person that the other seven people were also research subjects — just like the one guy, showing up on equal footing. Then he showed them images of lines, side by side, and asked the eight research subjects to judge the length of the lines. As the seven covert trained participants offered judgments that were plainly false — Line A is the longest! — the one poor bastard who didn’t know what was happening began to..say that…uh…Line A is the longest? Same principle:

Normative boundarymaking is social: Everyone says X, so you’d best not say Y, you pathetic freak. There are evolutionary reasons for people to try to not swim against the tide, because some degree of cooperation and order help people in difficult conditions do things like not starve. We test our judgment against the judgment of other people, to make sure we haven’t wandered too far off course.

So.

Dick Cheney is endorsing Kamala Harris, and this is a very serious matter. Mike Pence is also endorsing Kamala Harris, and Liz Cheney, and maaaaybe George Bush but TBD, because responsible Republicans are all definitely for Kamala Harris nudge nudge nudge, and banks don’t make endorsements exactly but they’re definitely sending some super-clear signals:

And so on:

See, everyone is for Harris. It’s the consensus of the respectable people. You’re not, uh, looking to oppose the respectable people, right? You’re not one of the…others, right?

This is the first presidential election in American history in which there’s no argument at all except all the others are doing it — a pure attempt to apply status anxiety to the problem of producing conformity. Actual news media argument:

Shut up and do what everyone else is doing, full stop. It’s America’s first playground humiliation election, and all the other kids are pointing at you.

The problem with this status-focused mass-psychological jiu jitsu is that tens of millions of Americans keep shrugging and saying that yeah, Line B is the longest. With narrowed eyes and tense shoulders. The social conformity mechanism is breaking down, and breaking down badly. The media is for X and academia is for X and the political establishment is for X and corporate America is for X and a consistent half of the country is pretty clearly for Y, even if the polls turn out to be dead-accurate:

You FOOLS are DANGEROUS OUTLIERS, you…half the country.

The signal is being transmitted, but the signal isn’t being received. If every “mainstream” figure shoves all of their social prestige into the same bet, but then the bet doesn’t pay off, the morning after becomes interesting. I don’t know, people might even begin to get the idea that the Cheney family isn’t respected all that much.

The mechanism behind the Asch Line Experiment is social trust — the confidence that the other people sitting around the table must be competent, functioning adults. We defer to the judgment of the others because we have a degree of presumptive respect for them. A not-insane argument would be that the Asch Line Experiment demonstrates the presence of social faith, comity, other-centeredness, and the absence of narcissism: Look, it seems like this to me, but the other people sitting around the table can’t all be idiots, right? Solomon Asch concluded that he had showed how people conform, but you could also say that he showed how people trust other people and try to take their perception into account. Man, my eyes must really be fooling me this morning, I wonder why.

So the moment in which every gatekeeping institution is endlessly pounding away on X IS THE ONLY RESPECTABLE OPINION, but half the country is narrowing their eyes and saying that we’ll stick with Y, thanks…

What does that imply? And what does it take to get there?