That 5 monkeys story is definitely not false, nor fabricated.
I've seen it myself in a social experiment where actors were placed in a waiting room. There were 5 actors that stood up for 5 seconds every time a bell was rang at random moments. A "test subject" was added and quickly joined in. They swapped out the actors one by one and long behold - after 30 minutes 6 random strangers were standing up when the bell was rang without having the slightest clue why.
That entire video smells of being fake. I’ll admit I don’t have anything other than a gut reaction to the combination of production quality, editing, and sheer silliness to go on. But there’s enough off that it raises my skepticism a lot.
Nowadays claiming loudly 'fake' seems to be the argument used for most things we can't readily understand, or simply as a default noise maker.
In the past the default argument was 'sorcery' or 'anathema'.
That's why we need the scientific method. Our primary impressions can be often wrong. We should not rely only on 'gut feelings' to reach our conclusions.
> Nowadays claiming loudly 'fake' seems to be the argument used for most things we can't readily understand, or simply as a default noise maker.
> In the past the default argument was 'sorcery' or 'anathema'.
I really don't like this. It looks fake because it's full of edits, skips over important bits where you'd expect doubt, and doesn't feel like its supplying the full context.
Yes, the conformity effect is real. But no, it's not as strong as EVERYONE loves to portray it. In actual studies, a good chunk of people don't abide by the effect, and it's probable that, contrary to the video, they do suspect they're being observed (by a study or more likely just some sort of process with a consequence). It's a stretch to assume that people copy things because that's what the group does, rather than thinking the group has a good reason to be doing something. The latter sounds the same, but when you think about it is a lot less interesting.
Most people, if they're the Asian girl, are just going to ask the group what they're doing.
It's on a totally different level than just crying 'fake'.
I think it is quite possible that for some behaviours humans tend to prefer to always use their own judgement, while the opposite is true for other behaviours.
We see a massive parallel experiment about this with some things that happen on Twitter or TikTok. And this goes from putting a bucket of ice over your head to the reaction to some political statement.
To have a catalogue of the cognitive biases we have as humans and which behaviours are more susceptible to this effect would be a hugely useful dataset.
I mean a little bit yeah. But problem solving through peer pressure is a real thing and it's totally legitimate. You do get some weird artifacts (because it functions via a weird distributed statistical function) and it can be exploited.
Some countries that get low amounts of sunlight due to latitude eat fish for breakfast. Apparently the nutrients in fish help you biologically deal with not having enough sunlight. And this results in statistically better health outcome vs other countries at the same latitude that don't eat fish as much.
Did eating fish start because people were running double blind 30 year dietician studies? Nope, it's just what other people were doing.
Think about it this way. Some problems are really hard to actually understand. And if you screw up you'll die (so you can't exactly learn the lesson even if the lesson was obvious). Culture and social cohesion is important because other people have learned (maybe unconsciously) a fatal lesson by watching others fail to learn that lesson. It can be life or death for you to pick up on that lesson.
It's also important that people question why we do things. Because otherwise we can end up all standing up when a bell rings for no reason. But both methods are necessary. Even if we end up doing some stupid things for a while as we sort out reality.
EDIT: I'm actually mostly unaffected by peer pressure. It sounds impressive because I'm extremely unlikely to do something stupid like stand up when a bell rings. Additionally, I can go off and learn things like type theory, lambda calculus, most programming languages like it's easy.
But the catch is that type theory is only easy compared to trying to understand social interaction logically. People often all agree about something that makes absolutely no sense to me ... and they're right (well, I've looked into this a lot and technically they're not right, but it works out and they get good outcomes, which is almost always close enough ... I think what happens is when their wrongness catches up to them they switch strategies or something, but I'm not sure). It often feels like living with a bunch of aliens who have psychic powers.
So, while it's easy to setup social experiments that make peer pressure look stupid, I'm not about to discount it's incredible usefulness.
Perhaps it'll make you feel better that there's a good reason we do it: when everyone else is doing something, it's often a good idea to follow them. We all love to hear the one time someone does something contrarian and it turns out well, but in general if you have no prior knowledge picking the thing that other people is doing is a good strategy because they may know a reason you don't.
A slightly better thing to do, of course, is ask why they're doing something.
I've seen it myself in a social experiment where actors were placed in a waiting room. There were 5 actors that stood up for 5 seconds every time a bell was rang at random moments. A "test subject" was added and quickly joined in. They swapped out the actors one by one and long behold - after 30 minutes 6 random strangers were standing up when the bell was rang without having the slightest clue why.
We're funny creatures :D
Just did a quick Google, here's the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEhSk71gUCQ