Can the new Eskom board, or any board, save the power utility now?

How often are you in a bar, rising unsteadily to your feet and announcing that you are going home because you are now too drunk to sing? And everyone around you says, “Oh come on, stay for one more.” And you do. 

Whether this has happened in this manner or some other way, we have all seen this movie; we tend to conform to the group. Most of us don’t like to be rude and unpleasant. We like to fit in. And anyway, we hadn’t actually, at that stage, had that much to drink. Or something.

Obviously, this tendency has been studied ad infinitum, partly because it's so important in absolutely crucial forums in society; juries, work teams, committees and boards, just to mention but a few. The most famous is an experiment called the Asch conformity experiments, which were conducted way back in the 1950s by psychologist Solomon Asch. The experiment was simple: a group of people were put into a room and told they were part of a vision test. Sets of lines of different length were flashed up on to a screen, and the group was asked to announce out loud whether the lines were the same length or different lengths. 

What the subject of the experiment didn’t know, however, was that everybody else in the group was acting in cahoots with the experimenter, and every now and then they would announce that two lines were of different lengths when they were the same, or the opposite. The actual test was how often the actual subject of the experiment went along with the wrong assessments. 

Well, take a guess. How often do you think the unfortunate test subject of the group would reject their own judgement and concur with the group? Turns out, a lot - obviously. In one set of experiments, there were 18 different sets of lines, 12 of which the confederates claimed were the same when they were not, or the opposite. Turns out, 75% of the experiment subjects rejected their own judgement and went along with the group at least once. 

It's depressing. We are sheep. 

This is fairly well known and obvious. But there were other aspects of the Asch experiments that are less well known. I guess it stands to reason but as the subject becomes more difficult, the more conformity increases. Conformity increases if the confederate group is of a higher status; also obvious. But the one that fascinates me is that if even one person in the confederate groups breaks ranks and gives the correct answer, the likelihood that the experiment subject will trust their own judgement shoots up. Turns out, minority opinions can be very useful.