Alternative facts are a gateway drug to fascism

One of the most celebrated research experiments in the field of social psychology is a series of studies the Polish-born Gestalt psychologist Solomon Asch began conducting in 1951 with 50 male students at Swarthmore, a small liberal arts college 10 miles southwest of Philly.

The published results of the experiment and various responses to its findings make up a literature that is referred to as the “Asch conformity experiments” or “the Asch paradigm.”

A lot of psychologists — even people on the street — were interested in the “conformity” aspect of the research because a Cold War was going on at the time and there was considerable talk about brainwashing as a way to control people’s minds.

Asch wanted to know what takes place in the psyche of a person who sees something, is asked to say what he just saw, and then says the exact opposite of what his eyes described — the eyes physical entities that ground us in reality — in other words, why would a person lie about something he knows to be true? 

If Asch used the parlance of today he would say “the liar” was not only treasonous but a generator of “alternative facts,” alternative facts being a gateway drug to fascism.

Asch first shared what he did at Swarthmore in a journal article called “Effects of group pressure on the modification and distortion of judgments.” He describes how the experiment took place in an ordinary conference room where, around a large rectangular table, he situated eight men who had agreed to participate in a psychology “vision test.”

The subjects were told they would be shown pictures on a placard — Picture One to the left and Picture Two beside it — and, after viewing both, were to say what in Picture Two was exactly the same as what was in Picture One. And the content of Picture One was nothing more than a black vertical line against a blank background.

Picture Two had three lines: one was shorter than the line in Picture One, one was longer, and the third exactly the same. The subjects had to call out A, B, or C; it was not a heavy lift.

At Swarthmore, the subjects saw 18 trials, that is, were shown 18 cards one after the other where the length of the line in Picture One varied as well as two of the lines in Picture Two but the third always matched the line in Picture One.

And since eight subjects made a judgment for 18 trials, 144 judgments were made in all. Plus, Asch had the study going on at three other universities in addition to the one at Swarthmore.

But here is the first wrinkle in the story: Before the eight students went into the experiment room, Asch secretly took seven aside and told them — hush-hush — they were going to be part of the research team; they were told what the experiment was all about, that the “vision test” would be rigged, and it was they who were going to rig it by picking a line in Picture Two that did not match the line in Picture One — they were told to speak their choice with confidence and no hesitation.

The purpose of the project was to see whether the eighth subject whom they would meet in the experiment room shortly — a foil or dupe — would go along with their crazy choices and deny the veracity of his own eyes.

All the dupe knew was that he would take part in an experiment with seven other students, that the group would be shown pictures — Picture One and Picture Two — and after scanning them, would make a judgment about their contents.

The research team arranged the seating so the dupe was at the end of the table and the last to voice his opinion.

Here’s the second wrinkle: When the first two sets of pictures were shown, the seven confederates picked the line in Picture Two that was the perfect match for the line in Picture One. They did not lie, so the dupe was led to believe the test a no-brainer.

But, starting with the third set of cards, the seven confederates dissimulated, picking the wrong line in Picture Two trial after trial, and their boldness in saying so rattled the dupe who began questioning his own eyes.

What takes place in a person’s mind who decides to cave to a lie?

And it should be pointed out that none of Asch’s subjects suffered from a visual disability like agnosia, which would radically alter what they saw. (I have in mind a patient of the late great neurologist Oliver Sacks who suffered from agnosia and once, after leaving Sacks’s office, grabbed his wife’s head thinking it was his hat on the hat rack — which Sacks describes in his wonderful book “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.”)

When Asch examined all his data together, he saw, “One-third of all the estimates in the critical group [the critical group being the dupes] were errors identical with or in the direction of the distorted estimates of the majority [the lies of the confederates].” That is, a third of the time the dupe denied what his eyes were telling him.

But more importantly perhaps was that Asch found “one quarter of the subjects [dupes] were completely independent and never agreed with the erroneous judgments of the majority.” They believed what their eyes said and mustered the courage “to recover from doubt and to re-establish their equilibrium … it was their obligation to call the play as they saw it.”

In several of his trials Asch introduced a ringer, a subject who disagreed with the confederates outright — which gave the dupe the courage to speak the truth as well.

And to test whether caving under pressure was the operative variable, Asch assembled a control group of subjects who were told they could write down their responses in private — under these conditions the dupes made a correct judgment 99 percent of the time.

As a social psychologist, Asch had to limit his conclusions to what took place in the experiment room; he never extrapolated to a family, a neighborhood, community, or society where a group or groups of people publicly contradict what people say they’re seeing — and when power’s involved — the contradiction has the force of a command.

On Saturday, Jan. 21, 2017, the day after Donald Trump was inaugurated as president of the United States, his side-show man, Sean Spicer, came to the mic and said the president drew the biggest crowd in inauguration history — even though photos taken from the Washington Monument the day before showed Trump’s crowd paled severely in comparison to the president’s before him.

When NBC’s Chuck Todd asked the new president’s other side-show sophist, Kellyanne Conway, why Spicer would lie like that, she said, “Don’t be so overly dramatic about it, Chuck. You’re saying it’s a falsehood, and they’re giving — our press secretary, Sean Spicer, gave alternative facts.” 

The man behind the Orwellian lie added, “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening” as if a confederate in Asch’s study.

Trump’s crime is not that he stuck a knife in the heart of the American Republic but that he took that knife and slashed the DNA of homo sapiens — a species whose eyes have evolved to near perfection in seeing what sits before them. The dupes threw over the advances of human evolution.

The result, as we know, is half a country that suffers from fascist aphasia aggravated by the fact that so many of the sufferers have nothing to lose. 

Some days I wake up and feel like a French existentialist imprisoned in a fifties film noire called “No Exit.”