Nicotine Without Asch

Like most people, when I’m meant to be getting on with something productive – you know, the kind of thing that pays bills and keeps the wife happy – I wander. It’s just far too easy to open a browser and search for donkey-juggling images (or a guide to building an explosive bag filled with dog excrement for forum members who rip others off with trades) while I’m sitting at the keyboard.

Which is why I was delighted to stumble across the Asch Conformity Experiment.

I’m sure we’re all well aware of the Stanford prison experiment. It’s the one where people were selected to take on the roles of prisoners and guards in a mock prison…and the guards were encouraged to enforce authoritarian measures and ultimately subject some of the prisoners to psychological torture.

If you aren’t familiar with it, you can see that a similar experiment is being carried out by Channel 5 where they are the guards and Celebrity Big Brother is the torture weapon.

There’s this well-known RTA brand, see. I owned not one but two of them; buying the first was a simple response the praises being sung, but the second? Honestly, I’ve no idea. I thought I really liked it but I didn’t – I hated it. The flavour produced was sorely lacking when compared to the market leader and it was such a pig when it was time to recoil.

But I persisted.

Eventually I sold one after a want ad went up and the second quickly followed suit in response to a personal message. It’s left me wondering what on earth I was thinking; what possessed me to stick with something I knew was a let-down? Anybody watching the recent series of Prime Witness or The Walking Dead Series #2 (Hershel’s farm) will know exactly where I’m coming from.

“Imagine yourself in this situation: You’ve signed up to participate in a psychology experiment in which you are asked to complete a vision test. Seated in a room with the other participants, you are shown a line segment and then asked to choose the matching line from a group three segments of different lengths. The experimenter asks each participant individually to select the matching line segment. On some occasions everyone in the group chooses the correct line, but occasionally, the other participants unanimously declare that a different line is actually the correct match. So what do you do when the experimenter asks you which line is the right match? Do you go with your initial response, or do you choose to conform to the rest of the group?”

I’ve always considered myself to be a freethinking non-conformist, it says so on my underpants, but I’m obviously not. I am some kind of human-Borg/sheep just going along with the collective mind. Everyone else tells me the atty is awesome then it must be me who is wrong and I really do enjoy vaping with it.

Only I didn’t, I really didn’t.

So, with the knowledge that I am as sentient as a Page 3 model in a reality show I am putting in place plans to avoid future errors of judgement: Hereonin I’m only going to buy things everyone else says is rubbish. Thank you Solomon Asch.