Why you need to be the one to speak up

Each of us sometimes feels the pressure of being the lone dissenter in a group. It can make you sweat and it can make your heart pound when you have to go up against the group. How strong is the pressure to conform?  This topic was explored and well-documented in the 1950s by Solomon Asch, a social psychologist who pitted the human tendency to conform against the tendency to be truthful. 

Asch told innocent subjects that they were going to participate in an experiment on visual perception.  The subjects were to participate in groups of seven to nine persons per group.  The group was instructed to indicate which of the three “comparison” lines were closest in length to a given line. Each person in the group gave his or her answer in turn.  There was only one innocent subject per group, however.  Everyone else in the group was a stooge who had been instructed to follow a routine prearranged by the experimenter.

The test was actually rather easy and the first three trials were simply a set up for what was going to happen next.  On the fourth trial (and, similarly, on selected subsequent trials), where the given line was 1.5 inches long, the three “comparison” lines were .5 inches long, 1.5 inches long and 2 inches long. The experiment had been arranged so that each of the stooges were designated to give his or her answer before the innocent subject had a chance. On that fourth trial, the …

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Americans reach new levels of ignorance.

According to a new Zogby poll involving 1,213 people across the U.S., three fourths of Americans "can correctly identify two of Show White's seven dwarfs while only a quarter can name two Supreme Court Justices." Asked what planet Superman was from, 60 percent named the fictional planet Krypton, while only…

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Iraq is good business.

In the September, 2006 Harper's "Notebook," Lewis H. Lapham begins with this quote by Rainer Werner Fassbinder:  In the last analysis, terrorism is an idea generated by capitalism to justify better defense measures to safeguard capitalism. Is there money to be made in Iraq?  Lapham, who has wielded a sharp…

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An older, humbler, Billy Graham

Billy Graham, now 87, recently gave an extended interview to Newsweek reporter Jon Meacham.  The interview contained a few surprises that brightened my day. First, Graham indicated that Christians need not be Bible literalists: The new interviews with NEWSWEEK, however, reveal a more intriguing figure than either his followers or his critics…

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What Is It With These (Which) People?

I’d like to do another riff on the science and religion thing, so bear with me.  I largely don’t bother going on about this issue anymore, except in those instances where there may be an audience of undecideds. 

One of the things about Americans in small groups is that by and large we will listen and we will weigh what we hear before making up our minds.  It comes down to the slickness of the rhetoric or the overwhelming honesty of an argument.  That’s on us, we who bother to make such arguments.  It helps to remember that we do this for those who haven’t made up their minds yet. 

Evolution vs Creation Science.  The arguments are settled, the science is in, there’s no real dispute except on the Culture War Front.  Evangelicals simply don’t like the program.  When the truth destroys a cherished myth, print the myth.  An old newspaper adage from the 19th Century. 

We’ve been having this crap now for a couple of decades at least, in Kansas back in the 90s, and the issue is well-enough known and the stakes thoroughly understood by enough folks on both sides that anyone moving to circumvent the Supreme Court decision (Edwards vs Aguillard, 1987) is doing so with the knowledge that they are being duplicitous.  They have decided that, as they cannot win their case on the basis of fact and reason, and since they believe they are right and everyone who disagrees with them is wrong, any tactic …

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