How The Weaponization Of Loneliness Feeds On Humans’ Conformity Impulse

The following is an excerpt from the author’s new book, “The Weaponization of Loneliness: How Tyrants Stoke Our Terror of Isolation to Silence, Divide, and Conquer.” (Bombardier Books, Post Hill Press.)

Wherever there is a monopoly on media, propaganda can control the narrative and thereby cultivate mass social conformity and compliance. Mass conformity then creates the illusion that a majority of society agrees with the propaganda, especially when any competing narrative is censored. This illusion has the snowball effect of drawing more people into accepting it.

But the fuel for acceptance comes from within each individual’s psyche: our need to belong and our terror of social rejection. Through various methods that play on those needs and fears, people suddenly will clam up about their opinions and attitudes if they perceive that expressing such opinions will get them ostracized. They will lie about what they believe and even about what they see before them.

Denying the Evidence of Our Own Eyes

In 1951, Solomon Asch, professor of psychology at Swarthmore College, began his experiments with this key question: “How, and to what extent, do social forces constrain people’s opinions and attitudes?” Much had already been written in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries about hypnosis and the effects of suggestibility on human behavior.

In each session of Asch’s experiments, a group of seven to nine young men participated in what was described to them as a psychological experiment in visual judgment. Their task was simple: match up the length of a line on one card with the corresponding length from a choice of three very different lengths of lines on another card. The answer was obvious at least 99 percent of the time.

But in that group setting, only one was the subject. He was seated last or second to last. At a certain point, the collaborators started giving the same incorrect answer, one after the other. The subject suddenly felt “unexpectedly in a minority of one, opposed by a unanimous and arbitrary majority with respect to a clear and simple fact.” He then had to decide which way to go: state the evidence of his own eyes or join the unanimous opinion of his peers. Furthermore, he had to answer publicly.

After over eighteen trials, subjects presented the wrong answer 36.8 percent of the time. Asch’s experiment has been replicated widely since the 1950s, with greater diversity among participants, including in age and sex. Yet, the findings remain the same: one-third to half of the time, the subject conforms to the incorrect majority on an obvious and non-controversial fact. In the critical trials, only 25 percent of the participants held steadfast without giving in to pressure at all. The other 75 percent gave a wrong answer at least once.

On the bright side, Asch also showed us how easily you can challenge the illusion of unanimity if just one person openly agrees with you. In a variation on the experiment, when a collaborator gave a correct answer while the rest

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