I have to run away and pay someone to listen to me bitch and moan about stuff (therapy) in thirteen minutes, but I thought I would try and write this down first.
So as I might have mentioned, I teach wee little humans in an after-school program. When we stretch and warm up before the class, we talk about things. Mostly we talk about the weather and do we need to be wearing boots yet and if Converse are made of leather do they count as boots, or we talk about pets and the kids recount long, dull stories of amusing things their pets have done, and then express shock and horror when I tell them I do not have a dog, nor a cat, nor even a measly goldfish or hermit crab. On one memorable occasion we talked about gross things to eat. Highlights included jellyfish, eel, chalk, dirt, and Rocky Mountain oysters. I had to cut that last topic a little short. Anyhoot, yesterday I had just the one kid in my class and we were talking about school. I was bitching about having to do a Spanish test next week, and he was bitching about having to do a Spanish test tomorrow that involves knowing all the south and central American countries and their capitals (way to go on context, Pip's Spanish teacher, but epic fail on actually teaching him any Spanish). Somehow it got around to all the reading I have been having to do lately for my social psych class and I found myself trying to explain the Asch line studies to him. It went roughly as follows...
"So I had to read about this thing for my psychology class. You know what psychology is, right? How people think, and why they do the stuff they do? Yeah, pretty much. Anyway, sometimes psychology people set out to prove stuff that everyone sort of knows is true anyway. Like conformity. Do you know what that is? Like, when a bunch of people are doing something, that means you're more likely to do it, too. Or you might do something on your own, but if a whole lot of people are doing that same thing, you're almost certain to do it. Anyway, this guy Asch, he decided he was going to prove that for a fact. So he did this test thing...he got some people to look at some lines, like...well, there were three people, right? And they all had to look at some pictures of lines, like, three lines. And then they had to look at a picture of one line. And they had to say which of the first lot of lines the second line, the one all by itself, which one of the first lines it was most like. You know, like, it was as long as line A, line B, or line C. And first up, the person who was being tested, he would say what he really thought. But then the other two people, who were really in on it, like, they were working for the man who was doing the experiment, they would lie and say "Oh, I think it's like line A", when everyone could SEE it was exactly the same as line B. And then the person who was being tested would get a bit confused. And he'd think "Well, I can see it's like line B. But these two other people, they're saying it's like line A. Maybe they know something I don't. Maybe I'll look a bit dumb if I say line B and it's wrong. Hm. I better just say what they're saying. They're probably right." So even though they knew for a fact it was wrong, they'd still say it, just so they wouldn't look dumb or make a fuss or anything. Isn't that weird?"
Pip mostly listened as I spouted off this diatribe, but I think I pretty much lost him towards the end. When you try to explain a lot of things to kids, they sort of look at you like, "I have no idea what you mean, and honestly don't know why you'd even be thinking about this in the first place." Which begs the question, if we all knew to begin with that people will do stuff that other people are doing, did we really need someone to make people look at a bunch of lines to prove it?
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