The Asches of Covid
See the world as it is, not as you're told it is.
Is it possible to resist the pull of the crowd? How difficult is it to maintain your conviction when it sits alone in a minority of one?
In 1951, a psychologist named Solomon Asch tried to answer these questions. He invited participants to take part in a “perception” test.1 Eight people sat at a table and were shown a series of charts with vertical lines on them. Their task was to say aloud, in turn, which of the three lines on the right of the chart matched the length of the line on the left. In the below example, the answer is obviously no. 2. Indeed, in each of the charts, the correct answer was equally clear and unambiguous.
Of the eight people who took part in each of the trials, only one was actually the test subject. Unknown to the test subject, the others were all actors who were given the same set of answers that they would voice during the experiment - some correct, most incorrect. Initially, the actors answered correctly and the test subject, who usually answered last or second-to-last, followed suit. However, from the third chart onwards, the actors began to intermittently give the same wrong answer to several of the charts (they gave the incorrect answer to 11 of 15 charts in total). In those cases, the test subject had to decide whether to stick to what his2 eyes were telling him or conform to the, clearly incorrect, consensus being offered by the others.
Asch found that a significant number of the participants did indeed conform and match the wrong answers of the actors. In total, 36.8% of the participants did so regularly with 75% offering at least one wrong answer. In the control group, where the participant was alone with no actors to influence him, the error rate was less than 1%.
The fully conforming group (36.8%) may be a minority but it is a sizeable one and one whose significance grows when you remember just how obvious the correct answer was that the participants were forcing themselves to ignore. Asch specifically designed it this way. He wanted the answers to each of the charts to be unmistakable so that only conscious conformity could explain any divergence from them.
In post interviews with the participants, when the true nature of the experiment was revealed, Asch identified two main reasons offered by those who conformed. The first was “Distortion of Judgement”. These participants convinced themselves that their judgement must be flawed and the others must be correct by virtue of their unanimity. These were low confidence people. They easily doubted themselves.
The second reason for conforming was related to “Distortion of Action”. These participants didn’t doubt their answer - they knew they were right but they simply couldn’t bring themselves to challenge the consensus of the room. They conformed to avoid the awkwardness of not conforming.
Asch’s experiment was pivotal in behavioural psychology and, like the Smoky Room experiment, it showed clearly that people will regularly ignore their own judgement, their own instincts, even their own senses if a group or a crowd pressures them (even passively) to do so. In my last essay, I tried to point out why that is problematic, especially in today’s world. Asch, himself, summed it up succinctly back in the 50s when he said:
“That intelligent, well-meaning, young people are willing to call white black is a matter of concern.”
Indeed.
Like the townspeople who cheered the Emperor’s new clothes, intelligent, well-meaning people can and will believe something that is manifestly untrue if there are enough people loudly believing it too.
From one set of lines to another. It’s no longer the 1950s. It’s the 21st century. The modern world is free, progressive - people are empowered to speak their minds (or speak their “truth”). Is what Asch discovered in 1951 still relevant in our brave new world of today? Are we still susceptible to the whim of the crowd?
Let’s try our own version of his experiment. Which line is bigger in the below graph - orange or blue?
The answer here is clearer even than those in Asch’s experiment. The orange line is unmistakably bigger. That’s what your eyes tell you, right? But would you stick to that answer if you were in a room where everyone else confidently declared that the blue line was, in fact, bigger? Would you begin to doubt yourself like those participants in Asch’s experiment? Might you think that, even if you’re right and they’re wrong, it would be easier just to agree with the others?
Now, what if it wasn’t just seven other people in a room telling you your eyes were wrong. What if it was a much bigger room and far more people? What if it was the whole world?
Because that is essentially what is happening right now. The lines represent Covid deaths in my country, Ireland. The blue line represents the second half of 2020 when the Pandemic was apparently raging and hospitals were overwhelmed. The orange line represents the second half of 2021 by which time we had managed to vaccinate a majority of our population with vaccines that promised to redeem us from the cold, sterile world into which we had been plunged.
The narrative that people, fat on a diet of government messaging and media manipulation, accept unquestionably is that the vaccines have improved our lot. They believe, essentially, that the blue line is bigger than the orange line. It must be. The orange line is our salvation. How can it be worse?
Let’s try a different graph. Again, which is bigger - the orange or the blue?
This graph represents Covid ICU cases in Irish hospitals. Again, the orange is 2021 and the blue is 2020. Again, things are worse now with the vaccines than last year without them. In fact, every single metric is worse: Deaths, Cases, Hospitalisations, ICU admissions, case positive rates.3 The orange line on all these charts is higher than the blue ones. Again, that’s what your eyes tell you but to believe them you have to ignore a million voices shouting the opposite - telling you that the vaccines are working. As Asch found, this can be a hard thing to do.
Especially, as some of those million voices can be compelling. They’ll tell you that in 2020 we shuttered our economy, decimated small businesses, removed the right to free movement, isolated and abandoned old people in care homes where they died alone, and suspended children’s education and their entire way of life. Were it not for those life-destroying measures the blue lines would be much higher, apocalyptically higher.
Except they’re not. We can’t deal with make-believe, only with what is real and in front of us. We can’t let stories, convoluted stories of what might be, influence what actually is. Those blue lines were never apocalyptically high anywhere. Not in Sweden4 or South Dakota,5 neither of which employed any of those measures. Not in Florida6 which had given them up by summer 2020 and not in Texas7 which followed suit in early 2021. To believe that they would have been is an act of faith - an act of believing in a story that you were told but cannot see with your own eyes.
And even if it was true, that those measures somehow prevented a tidal wave of death despite the evidence to the contrary (including a remarkable 66 studies and counting showing either zero or minimal impact of restrictions on case/death numbers) the vaccines were meant to deliver us equally from sickness and from restrictions, not trade one for the other. As one of Ireland’s leading immunologists said in February 2021:
One hundred percent. A perfect number. A perfect promise. One that turned to ash and disappeared in the breeze almost as soon as it was uttered. Here we are, 10 months on from that pronouncement, a pronouncement built on little more than the claims of the very companies who made and sold us the vaccines, and those of us here on this beautiful island on the edge of Europe find ourselves, despite a 90%+ vaccination rate, with more sickness, more death, and now, incredibly, more restrictions8 than this time last year. If that is not vaccine failure then I don’t know what is.
And despite this, our leader, Taoiseach Michéal Martin, will still stand in front of the nation and tell us, as he did just last month, that the blue lines are bigger than the orange lines.
“We’re in a much better position to last year because the power of vaccination has been dramatic.”9
- Michéal Martin, 11th November 2021
Who are we to disagree with him? It is as if we are in that room back in 1951 and not only are all the other people telling us we are wrong but the man in charge of the experiment, Solomon Asch himself, has come in and confirmed it. “The blue lines are bigger,” he declares. “Everyone can see it, why can’t you?”
And all you can do it sit there and think of what another man once said, a long time ago but writing as if he were describing this very day.
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
- George Orwell, 1984
E p i l o g u e
Solomon Asch later conducted different versions of his experiment, altering the set up in various ways to further probe his results. One such version involved Asch instructing one (and only one) of the seven actors in the room to give the correct answer to all the graphs. The other six actors would all offer the same wrong answer on the agreed charts as per the original experiment but this one particular actor would answer correctly in defiance of the others. Asch wanted to see what effect the presence of a confederate, validating the trial subjects’ perception, would have on their propensity to conform to the incorrect majority. He found that it had a significant effect. The presence of a confederate dropped conformity to just 5%.
As we continue to wade through the morass of this Covid era, where untruths are presented as gospel and where we are encouraged to disbelieve or disavow the evidence of our eyes, those of us who refuse to do this often wonder what we can do. What value can I bring?
Asch showed us the answer.
You can be the confederate - the voice of dissent amidst a din of conformity that helps some person, somewhere, to resist the sway of the crowd, to stick to what they see and believe and, ultimately, to not reject, as Orwell once wrote, the “evidence of their eyes and ears”.
This has value. More than you might think.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments
All the trial subjects were men. This is obviously a flaw but probably wasn’t seen as a big issue at the time. One does wonder how the results might have varied had women participated. I suspect, for a variety of reasons, that they would have fared better.
Sweden is in 56th place in the world for Covid deaths. It is 17th out of 27 EU countries. And although much is made of its comparison with its Scandinavian neighbours, its all-cause mortality for 2020 is completely consistent with them.
South Dakota is an unremarkable 15th out of 50 US states for Covid deaths.
Florida is 9th out of 50 states and will drop as this winter’s wave washes across North America, leaving southern states generally unscathed.
Texas is 25th out of 50 states and, like Florida, will likely drop further as Covid spreads north.
Ireland actually reopened in December 2020. The current restrictions, tightening everyday, are indeed more severe than this time last year.
https://www.independent.ie/news/taoiseach-micheal-martin-says-i-dont-see-christmas-lockdowns-41043663.html
The confederate gives me hope in what is a very bleak looking world right now
I've just discovered you, and your illuminating and erudite writing is a light in dark times. I've been sharing your pieces anywhere I see a chink of openness