“Tell me what to believe and I will believe it sincerely.”
The pull to socially conform is a riptide that can alter individual perception and maybe even overwhelm a person’s conscience.
That seems to be a fair conclusion, although one taken with liberties, of an experiment in which normal adult subjects were asked a question that pre-schoolers could correctly answer, but after first hearing deliberately wrong answers submitted by coached third-party adults, the tested subjects mostly picked the erroneous choice. Why?
The reason may be buried in two regions mapped out in the brain. One region is devoted completely to perception, which is where social conformity appears as activity. The other region, linked to emotion, is the center for independent judgment.
A study made a few years ago by Dr. Gregory Berns, a psychiatrist at Emory University, used the latest MRI technology to catch the brain during actual acts of decision-making.
“It had all the right controls, and is a new contribution, the first to look at social conformity inside a brain magnet,” according to Dr. Brian Knutson, a neuroscientist at Stanford.
Dr. Dan Ariely, an MIT Professor of Management, said “It suggests that information from other people may color our perception at a very deep level.”
So much of what we and our students think, feel and do is an expression of brain geography.
Will the DOE make use of this research? Hopefully. But first they need to get the clocks synchronized.
Ever noticed that no two clocks in any school tell the same time at any given hour?
