• Dissenters can move groups, sometimes.

• Dissenters can move groups, sometimes.
We know that under certain circumstances, subordinates can break up the consensus imposed by the boss, redirect discussions and change resulting decisions. At least two threads of research support this conclusion (Atkinson et al 731-749). First, the post-world war explorations of conformity and obedience showed that, while most subjects would obey authority or the majority consensus even to the point of torturing people, they had such misgivings that if they saw others disobeying or disagreeing, they would as well (Atkinson et al 736, 743, 744).

Probably the most famous studies were conducted by Stanley Milgram at Yale University, in which subjects were ordered to “teach” other participants bypunishing their errors with electric shocks. The people being “corrected” were really Milgram’s confederates-- that is, secretly in his employ, and they only pretended to suffer. Despite their dismay at the apparent suffering of the confederates, most of the real subjects continued to follow orders and intensify the electric shocks. But when other confederates, in the role of fellow “teachers”, openly disobeyed the researchers, the rate of obedience of the real subjects dropped from 65% to 10 (Atkinson 743).

Solomon Asch conducted another well-known set of experiments in the 1950s, in which he asked groups to make judgments about such things as the length of lines in a display. The correct answers were deliberately obvious, but Asch had salted his groups with confederates instructed to give the wrong answer. There was only one real subject in each group. And when all the others gave the wrong answer, the subjects did, too, about one-third of the time, on average. But here, too, “If even one confederate breaks with the majority, the amount of conformity drops from 32 percent of the trials to about 6 percent“(Atkinson et al 736).

Several distinct mechanisms may be operating here. First, the fact that one person challenges convention encourages others to do so, too. Have you ever been in a situation, say at work, where the boss is resolutely trying to ignore the elephant in the room in hopes her subordinates won’t notice? Everyone keeps looking intently at the boss, to avoid startled glances at the elephant, and to act as if it were completely commonplace. Thus we demonstrate to our masters that we, too, can be sophisticated, and team players. But then the junior deputy assistant file clerk exclaims from the back of the room “Jeepers, who’s gonna clean up after the elephant?” And after a moment of shock we all chime in, because an elephant, after all, is a big thing.

Surprisingly, the dissenter does not even have to give the correct answer. Even when the dissenter’s answers are more incorrect than the majority’s, the spell is broken and subjects are more inclined to give their own correct judgments . . . . Nor does it matter who the dissenter is. A black dissenter reduces the conformity rate among racially prejudiced white subjects just as effectively as a white dissenter (Atkinson et al 736).

While the act of questioning is important, so is the language, and dissenters can model both.

Many people in Milgram’s study simply did not know how to stand up to authority and express their decision to disobey without embarrassment. They literally didn’t have the words. . . . A man repeatedly protested and questioned the experimenter, but he too obeyed, even when the victim had apparently collapsed in pain. “He thinks he is killing someone,” Milgram commented, “yet he uses the language of the tea table” (Wade, Tavris 1993 664).

Beyond simply opening up the discussion dissenters can convince others to accept specific positions. Pursuing Asch's line of inquiry, some European investigators placed two confederates amidst groups of people asked to answer easy, obvious questions of fact. The experimenters’ fake subjects consistently gave the wrong answer, and persuaded about a third of the real subjects to give the wrong answer as well.

The general finding is that minorities can move majorities toward their point of view if they present a consistent position without appearing rigid, dogmatic, or arrogant. Such minorities are perceived to be more confident, and occasionally, more competent than the majority (Maass & Clark, 1984). . . .
But the most interesting finding from this research is that the majority members in these studies show internalization --a change of private attitudes-- not just compliance or public conformity. In fact, minorities sometimes obtain internalization from majority members even when they fail to obtain public conformity . . . .
These findings serve to remind us that the majorities of the world typically have the social power to approve or disapprove, to accept or reject, and it is this power that can obtain compliance [obedience]. In contrast, minorities rarely have such social power. But if they have credibility, then they have the power to produce internalization and, hence, innovation, social change, and revolution (Atkinson et al 746-7).

The findings also remind us that changing minds and changing behaviors are separate steps. And the fact that confident wrong minorities can convince majorities may help explain the fact that, while many conservatives have a complex, nuanced, learning view of the world (see Christian Smith's study of rightist Christians), they consistently support leaders who offer much simpler ideas.

A second set of studies explored the “bystander” problem: how and when do people take responsibility during emergencies. In 1964 a New York City woman named Kitty Genovese was murdered in front of dozens of witnesses, none of whom helped her. (A similar incident happened with a hit and run driver in Hartford CT in 2008). The murder prompted a number of experiments which documented how people respond to fires, accidents, and the like. In one study, for example, a man apparently collapsed on the subway, while the researchers noted who helped him and how quickly. The research showed that most people will indeed help each other, but may need a push (Atkinson 730-4). We tend to depend on cues from one other to define a situation and take action (“pluralistic ignorance” and “diffusion of responsibility”, 730-1) and without someone to take that first step, we might not act at all.

On the other hand, if the situation already seems well-defined --if, say, bystanders can see a collapsing man as a dangerous drunk-- it's unlikely that we will choose a response from our repertoire of helpful actions. After we've made up our minds, we might even resent someone who tries to change them.

Considering how people react to crimes and emergencies, Cummins writes,

Even though you are the victim in need of help, you must help bystanders to define your situation as an emergency. Don’t just scream-- cry “Help!” Describe your situation to help clarify it for the bystanders. . . . Assign responsibility. Point to someone and say, “You, call the police” (17). . . .

A more cynical way of putting it is that if you are a victim, it is crucial that you get the human propensity to conform working to your advantage: Define the behavior of getting and giving you help as that to which bystanders must conform (18).

Social situations are of course vastly more complex than experimental conditions, and bosses have had several thousand years to develop ways to sabotage or circumvent our efforts to redefine problems and come up with new solutions. But each of us has that capacity, if we can mobilize it.


• We learn and change because we need to, not to please each other.
A friend of mine works for a union. Sometimes she frets that staff organizers encourage employees to take risks that the organizers themselves are not taking; for example, the employees can get fired for striking or other union work. I tell her to trust the members. They know very well the risks of organizing, and the risks of not organizing. They don’t take action because some outside agitator parachutes in and riles ‘m up, but because they see that’s their best course of action.

I’d say something similar to the Latina at the Race Relations Center. In her model, the best you can do in the short term is elicit sympathy for immigrants; they are human beings, after all, just as you and I. With a stronger commitment on the part of the learners, you can guide discussion over time to gently pick apart their preconceptions. Ultimately we’ll be led to change because we trust our guide to lead us through the difficult parts.

Conversely, or perversely, I suspect the difficult parts are what most often motivate us. All the fears that push us to racism also, when racism fails, push us to find better solutions. If racism weren’t so expensive and stressful to practice, if it weren’t so indivisibly tied to our concubine’s place in the corporate economy, if it didn’t require us to betray our own best selves on a daily basis, we’d have no reason to challenge it in the first place. So I’d say, as political workers we don’t have to establish ourselves as Mom or therapist to raise tough issues in a productive way. The key is not to discourage folks from expressing their true feelings by treating important questions as too dangerous to deal with.