Getting People Wrong
Imitation remains a powerful force in your life, even as an adult, and when educators turn up their noses at imitation, they are getting people wrong.
Here, the author of How Traditions Live and Die discusses Asch's famous conformity experiments from the 1950s and a more recent version from the 1990s. If you are not familiar with the original experiments, this video will be helpful.
As is well known, a substantial minority of people will systematically endorse the false opinion of a majority. One should note, however, that in most versions of the experiment, imitating the majority entails no cost at all (on the contrary, pleasing others may be counted as a benefit). What happens when material rewards are introduced?
In a modified version of Asch’s paradigm, Baron et al. asked subjects to recognize, in a lineup, an individual they had previously seen on a picture. They varied both the amount of information available to the subjects (by changing the amount of exposure to pictures subjects got) and the importance of the task (by introducing monetary incentives).
Just to make this clear, since it wasn't to me on a first read, participants in a group all look at the same photo of an individual. Then they are all asked to identify that individual in a lineup, one at a time, aloud. But there are 'confederates' in the group, planted by the researcher to deliberately give incorrect answers.
So, imagine being in this group with a bunch of confederates. If the photo goes by really quickly (amount of exposure is low), you can imagine that you would defer to the confederates as to the correct answer, since your own personal information is unreliable. You can also imagine that if there were monetary incentives involved (raising the importance of the task), you might resist and go with your own perception.
Subjects blindly imitated a misleading confederate when the stakes were not high, or when their own personal information was unreliable (i.e., when the task was difficult because exposure to the pictures was short). They trusted their own judgments otherwise—in the condition where the stakes were high and the task was easy. It should be noted that, when the task was difficult and the motivation [incentive] was high, subjects were much more likely to imitate the confederates than in any other condition. This makes perfect sense, since they had every reason to trust the unanimous confederates and few reasons to trust their own dubious perception . . .
Actually, this doesn't make "perfect sense." It just suggests that incentives can't necessarily override other people's opinions.
In other words, subjects followed the misleading confederates mostly when their own judgment would have been wrong as well. Their use of social information was flexible, indeed close to optimal given the constraints.
True. The story that the author wants to tell here is that people flexibly choose to imitate or rely on their own judgment, based on the information they have. No argument here. We explored flexible imitation here and here.
What is also undeniable is that imitation remains a powerful force in your life, even as an adult, and—the point I really want to hammer home—when educators turn up their noses at imitation, they are getting people wrong. And this ignorance is helped along, ironically, by the very people they serve, because no one wants to think of themselves as an imitator.
We can go on at length to try to save your pride and show all the ways you are not an imitator, even while staying true to the science. But this just waters down the lesson people should start with:
Tough. You are a cultural animal, not a lone individual on the Serengeti. Your cognition and emotions have been gradually wired to live in groups of other humans, not by yourself, left to your own devices (as "magical" and wondrous as those are). Imitation is a powerful strategy in your cultural survival arsenal, and you use it all the time—stop being so ashamed of it. Embrace and accept it.
We want students to be innovative and self-reliant, but not at the cost of denying what makes them human.
