for sir toney

Aviva Rutkin

New Scientist, August 15, 2015

It has long been known that people tend to bend their opinions toward those of the majority. In 2011, Jamil Zaki, a psychologist at Stanford University in California, and colleagues discovered why. It involves the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain's reward center that lights up when we encounter things we want, like a chocolate bar. Zaki's team found that it also activates when people are told what others think. And the more this part of the brain responds to information about group opinion, the more someone will adjust their opinion towards the consensus.

Conformity can be useful in our day-to-day lives, letting others serve as a guide in unfamiliar situations, says Lisa Knoll, a neuroscientist at University College London. But it can also lead us into danger. Earlier this year, Knoll published a study in which she asked people to rate the riskiness of texting while crossing the street, driving without using a seat belt and so on. After seeing a number that supposedly represented the evaluations of others, all the volunteers moved their ratings in the direction of the majority, even if that meant downgrading their initial estimate of risk.

That dynamic may have been at work in February 2012, when three members of a skiing group, including pros, sports reporters and industry executives, died in an avalanche on a backcountry slope in Washington state. Keith Carlsen, a ski photographer on the trip, told The New York Times that he'd had doubts about the outing but dismissed them: "There's no way this entire group can make a decision that isn't smart."