Field of reference: Psychology
Description: Group influence on an individual
"Normative influence, a function of social impact theory, has three components.[10] The number of people in the group has a surprising effect. As the number increases, each person has less of an impact. A group's strength is how important the group is to a person. Groups we value generally have more social influence. Immediacy is how close the group is in time and space when the influence is taking place."
Link to the article
Field of reference: Psychology
Description: The Asch conformity experiment showed how an individual will conform to the group and how even perception and cognition can be distorted by the group's influence
"This experiment was conducted using 123 male participants. Each participant was put into a group with 5 to 7 "confederates" (people who knew the true aims of the experiment, but were introduced as participants to the naive "real" participant). The participants were shown a card with a line on it, followed by another card with 3 lines on it labeled a, b, and c. The participants were then asked to say which line matched the line on the first card in length. Each line question was called a "trial". The "real" participant answered last or next to last. For the first two trials, the subject would feel at ease in the experiment, as he and the other "participants" gave the obvious, correct answer. On the third trial, the confederates would start all giving the same wrong answer. There were 18 trials in total and the confederates answered incorrectly for 12 of them, these 12 were known as the "critical trials". The aim was to see whether the real participant would change his answer and respond in the same way as the confederates, despite it being the wrong answer.
Solomon Asch thought that the majority of people would not conform to something obviously wrong, but the results showed that 24% of the participants did not conform on any trial. 75% conformed at least once, and 5% conformed every time."
Field of reference: Sociology, Health
Description: Human populations are arranged in social networks that determine interactions and influence the spread of diseases, behaviours and ideas.
"Our results give insight into the transmissive nature of positive and negative emotional states. Determining to what extent particular emotions or behaviours are infectious is a promising direction for further research with important implications for social science, epidemiology and health policy. Our model provides a theoretical framework for studying the interpersonal spread of any state that may also arise spontaneously, such as emotions, behaviours, health states, ideas or diseases with reservoirs."
Link to the academic paper
Field of reference: Psychology
Description: Where our sense of free will comes from
"Especially in contrast with our subjective sense of the determined past, the experience of our own behavior in the present seems particularly spontaneous and “free.” Because we do not experience at the same time all of the unconscious influences and impulses that produced that behavior (see Bargh & Morsella, 2007), our phenomenal experience is hugely biased in the direction of feeling that we have much more freedom than we actually do. But our feelings, like much else about us, have evolved because of their adaptive significance and are essential for normal cognitive functioning (e.g., Gray, Schaefer, Braver, & Most, 2005; Tranel, Bechara, & Damasio, 2000). We have also learned that feelings of being in control are far more beneficial to our functioning than are feelings of helplessness; thus these subjective feelings of free will are one of the “positive illusions” (Taylor, 1989) we hold dear. Yet this benefit is irrelevant to the scientific status or truth value regarding the actual existence of free will; however positive and adaptive the feeling, it is still an illusion."
Field of reference: Psychology
Description: An unseen series of cause and effect may lead to an illusion of free will
s. As Konrad Lorenz (1962, p. 23) admonished us, “it is the duty of the natural scientist to attempt a natural explanation before he contents himself with drawing upon factors extraneous to nature.” Treating free will as a force outside the laws of nature in the Locke/Searle manner is similar to how intuition and creativity have long been popularly viewed as being due to some kind of mysterious “spark” or quasi-magical process. In all three cases, the argument that the phenomenon is an originator and not itself caused by some other process is actually just an admission that we don’t know what causes it; as Spinoza (1677/1951, p. 134) put it, “men believe themselves to be free, simply because they are conscious of their actions, and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined.”
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