Verifiable Secret Ballots
Sample reference line and three comparison lines in Solomon Asch Experiment The November 1955 issue of Scientific American magazine* announced the most consequential discovery ever made about the workings of the human mind. One quarter of all people are immune to the distorting effect of social pressure on their judgment. The remaining three-quarters will lie through their teeth about so simple a black-and-white fact as the length of a line--simply because a small but apparently unanimous group persists in making the same error. No persuasion or arguments were offered during the experiment; all but one of the participants were instructed to lie about the relative lengths of lines on paper with a perfectly straight face. This discovery of inborn complaisance as a fact of human nature has ominous implications for the democratic process--the process that determines the kind of laws that are passed. Long before the Asch experiment, mystical zealots of every religion tortured...