The Room That Agreed With the Wrong Line

The board of predictable mistakes. This lesson adds the ones other people cause: the errors you make because of who else is in the room, and the one you make when you judge someone else and forget their room entirely.

Before you start. Cognitive Biases showed that a fast, automatic guess can pull the same wrong way every time, without you noticing. How Psychology Knows What It Knows showed how to ask whether a famous study held up when someone ran it again. You need both here: every study in this lesson is famous, and they did not all survive the second run.

The idea in 30 seconds

People often go along with a group’s obviously wrong answer, and one person who disagrees with the group makes it much easier for others to stop going along.
Most ordinary people will follow an authority’s instructions much further than they predict, and a 2009 partial replication found that again.
When we explain other people’s behaviour, we overweight their character and underweight the situation they were in.
After acting against a belief for too small a reason, people sometimes shift the belief to match, though the lab evidence for this is weaker than its fame.
More bystanders can mean each one is less likely to help, but the famous Genovese story behind this idea was largely wrong.
The Stanford prison experiment does not hold up: the guards were coached.

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