Jocko Podcast - Jocko Underground: The Trickery and Power of Group Influence. Moving Out of California? Telling White Lies. Helping Others Through Burnout

Episode Date: April 30, 2021

The Asch Experiment. Measuring conformity in groups.Moving out of California for better a better business situation?56 y/o starting Jiu Jitsu tips.Helping a friend through burnout.Telling white lies on an application to join the Marines.Should I pursue football if I already got cut from the team in college?Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is the Jocko Underground podcast number 16 with Echo Charles and me Jocka Willink. Also joining us tonight, Daryl Cooper. So here we go. Good evening to you guys. Whatever. All right. So I was reading, I don't know what particular wormhole I was down in this situation. I was reading this article.

Something called the Ash experiment run by a psychologist named Solomon Ash. I want to say this is like early 1950s when this went down. And so we ran an experiment, which experiments are kind of underrated. And I think they used to be able to get away with all kinds of stuff. This one isn't bad, but they clearly, maybe that's a good, maybe that's a good one for the unraveling podcast. Just look at some gnarly psychological experiments. They're out there. Yeah, our medical experiments, we get into Tuskegee, the syphilis experiment.

Yeah, that's a freaking nasty. Feel a little bit of national shame for a moment. That's a horrible, horrible one. All right, so this experiment was set up like this. They had eight people in a room. Seven of the people are actors, or they call them Confederates in the psychological word, but they're actors. And one person out of these eight is the subject of the experiment. And so then they get asked a question, this particular experiment, what they did was they had, they described it as a very.

vision test or a perception test and they had a line by itself and then there was three lines separated from it but near it and they were of different lengths and they were numbered one two and three and you'd look at the line that was by itself and the question was which of the other three lines is the same size as the line that's by itself so it's a real simple straightforward test and that's what they do and they'd show them a bunch of different lines and a bunch of different other lines. And then they'd ask one at a time, they would ask, okay, which one is it?

Is it one, two, or three? And they'd go down the seating, right? So they're all sitting at a desk, like a long desk. They're all sitting there facing these lines. They put up the lines, and then they go left to right. All right, what do you think? And it's an actor. And what do you think?

It's an actor. All the actors answer first, and then they have the actual subject of the experiment. So sometimes the actors would all give the wrong answer. And when they did that, guess what happened? 30 something, 32, 35, 37% of the time, the subject would give the wrong answer too. He would just get influence. When the actors gave the correct answer, there was only 1%, it was actually less than 1% deviation.

Less than 1% deviation But when the actors, you know, when the, when the correct answer is, you know, line number two And all the actors go, line number three, line number three, line number three, line number three, line number three, They'd get to the subject and the subject would go, yep, line number three Yeah 35% of the time when it's when it's and I saw the images it's not It's really clear. There's not much different you know there's not much not much not much not much debate about which one of these lines is like this or which one of these lines the correct

answer so and you they got to ask multiple times and so 75% of the subjects so 75% of the subjects conformed at least one time so almost everybody that went in there 75% at least one time conformed oh they were doing it over and over they did it over and over they asked you know 10 they'd show you 10 things yeah and um um And then here's another point on this. When they ran the same experiment, but they would have one of the actors out of the seven give the correct answer, that was enough to drop the percentage down to only 5% instead of 35% of conformity.

So they get done with the experiment. They did some interviews with the people. And what do you got so far, D.C.? Anything so far? Yeah, I got a couple of things that are very interesting about this, about this. I guess questions that I have about it, one is the fact that whenever they run any of these psychological experiments, these post-war experiments where they're kind of really trying to figure out how Germany happened, right? That's really what they were trying to figure out. Was it conformity?

Was it some like rooted darkness in like the heart of mankind that emerges under certain circumstances? Is that you have to disguise the experiment in order for the experiment to work, right? If you were to tell these people, listen, so these people are going to say, you can't do it that way. That would not work. And there's an interesting thing that goes to self-awareness here, where if the person is like aware of what it is you're trying to get them to do, then often they'll do the right thing because their priorities is performing the task that you set in front of them. Whereas if you can redirect their attention in a way, then their priority reverts to the thing that, the, the, mode that we usually operate in, which is making sure that we are aligned with people around us. And because conformity is not always a bad, I mean, it's not usually even a bad thing.

You know, that's the weird thing, right? It's like we look at, like, you brought up that book, Ordinary Men. I think you've done it on Jocko podcast before. And people have commented on the fact that, you know, you had all these middle-aged gendarmes, German military policemen who had been brought in. We're doing horrible, terrible things to Jews in Poland. And the reasons that they gave afterwards, and these were men who acknowledged their criminality, were very open about what they had done, they weren't trying to hide anything,

was that the impulses that drove them to do the horrible things that they did were very often, like, pro-social impulses and things that in another context were not necessarily a bad thing. Like you didn't want to leave your friends to do the dirty work alone. You know, if they're going to do it, then you have to do it. It has to be done, so we're all going to do it, that kind of thing. You know, wanting to be a part of the group and maybe deferring to the judgment of others, you know, if we're sitting here right now, maybe if it's like a line is two inches and it's, you know, it's measuring it against a one inch line. Maybe I'd hold my ground or whatever. But there's not necessarily anything wrong with like you guys are right there saying, no, no, no, listen, we're telling you this is how it is.

I might really think that it's a certain way, like a different way. But at the same time, I trust and respect you guys enough to be like, huh, maybe. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm wrong. And that's not necessarily a bad impulse. Yeah. So the two things that you just talked about, because when they got done to the experiment, they actually interviewed the people and said, well, what were you thinking?

Why did you say this? So there was two prominent answers. The first one is what you talked about. Well, I guess it's part of what you talked about. It's normative influence, meaning I just want to be normal. And if there's a bunch of people that are saying something, like I don't want to stand out that's that was most of it most of it was that and then some of it was also what you're talking about so that is a little excerpt of what we are doing on the jocco underground podcast

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