It's time we acknowledge that conservative (Republican) efforts to ban same-sex marriage are just another type of eugenics. The history of the 20th-century is full of examples of majorities that tried to deter or prevent "undesirable" minority groups from having families. The mentally ill, the mentally disabled, the physically deformed,…
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 …
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…
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…
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…