Have you noticed that we are social creatures who devote a lot of our time to thinking about social ranking?
And that a by-product of this obsession is a tendency to blindly trust the claims and ideas of people who rank above us?
Perceptions of authority and superiority impress us, they also influence us—whether they are valid or not.
Do people in authority in one field, however, have an innate authority to talk about everything they feel like taking about?
On top of that, we don’t even require authority to influence us, because as social creatures, we have the tendency to conform with others. And this conformity bias is so powerful that it might lead us to do foolish things.
One good example is shown in the following experiment by Solomon Asch.
Asch asked one real subject and several fake ones (who were working with him) which of the lines B, C, D, and E is of equal length as A?
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