In a February article in the online magazine Slate, Columbia University Professor Duncan Watts exhumed the work of the late Princeton social psychologist Solomon Asch to explain what Watts called the ...

You’re in a room, participating in what you were told is a visual perception experiment, and everyone around you insists that two unequal lines are the same length. You feel confused, sick, and ...

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. One of the most famous experiments in social psychology took place in the early 1950s. Solomon Asch, a ...

Exactly what is the effect of the opinions of others on our own? In other words, how strong is the urge toward social conformity? The question is approached by means of some unusual experiments ...