Page 13 - Make Work Great

Make Work Great

may well predate the existence of such displays. Most likely, you do
it because that’s what everyone does on an elevator.
Decades ago, in a televised series of “Candid Camera” pranks,
three actors repeatedly boarded an elevator with a single unsuspect-
ing rider. The actors didn’t say or do anything out of the ordinary,
except that they stood facing sideways or backward, rather than
toward the doors. Consistently, when the doors opened at various
fl oors, the rider was facing the same way as the actors. 1
This amusing experiment has been conducted many times and in
many ways. In one of the most famous, social psychologist Solomon
Asch orchestrated a series of “perceptual problem-solving” sessions,
meetings in which a group of strangers were asked for answers to
obvious questions about the lengths of various lines. As in the “Can-
did Camera” scenario, all of the strangers except one were actors car-
rying out specifi c instructions—in this case, to answer unanimously
and incorrectly. In the majority of cases, the subject, who was always
asked last, would give an answer that matched the obviously incorrect
opinion of the majority. 2
Asch himself never concluded whether his subjects simply sub-
verted their own opinions to the majority, or whether their percep-
tions were actually altered by it. But in a recent study, psychiatrist
and neuroscientist Dr. Gregory Berns led the recreation of a similar
scenario with a twist: the addition of functional magnetic resonance
imaging (MRI) scans measuring the subject’s brain activity. In the
cases where subjects went along with incorrect group decisions, their
brain activity suggested that it was not a conscious choice to conform
but a potential change to their perception of the truth. 3
If group pressure forces us to subvert our own opinions, that’s
problem enough. But it seems that it may go even further and change
our actual perceptions.

We Are Driven by Authority
Would you harm an innocent person just because an authority fi g-
ure told you to do so? We all would like to believe that our answer

2