agents in other neighborhoods, disabuse themselves of a false consensus, and resist the pressure to comply or enforce. The opening up of neighborhoods by long-distance channels dissipated the enforcement of the fanatics and prevented them from intimidating enough conformists into setting off a wave that could swamp the society. One is tempted toward the moral that open societies with freedom of speech and movement and well-developed channels of communication are less likely to fall under the sway of delusional ideologies.
Macy, Willer, and Ko Kuwabara then wanted to show the false-consensus effect in real people—that is, to see if people could be cowed into criticizing other people whom they actually agreed with if they feared that everyone else would look down on them for expressing their true beliefs.283 The sociologists mischievously chose two domains where they suspected that opinions are shaped more by a terror of appearing unsophisticated than by standards of objective merit: wine-tasting and academic scholarship.
In the wine-tasting study, Macy et al. first whipped their participants into a self-conscious lather by telling them they were part of a group that had been selected for its sophistication in appreciating fine art. The group would now take part in the “centuries-old tradition” (in fact, concocted by the experimenters) called a Dutch Round. A circle of wine enthusiasts first evaluate a set of wines, and then evaluate one another’s wine-judging abilities. Each participant was given three cups of wine and asked to grade them on bouquet, flavor, aftertaste, robustness, and overall quality. In fact, the three cups had been poured from the same bottle, and one was spiked with vinegar. As in the Asch experiment, the participants, before being asked for their own judgments, witnessed the judgments of four stooges, who rated the vinegary sample higher than one of the unadulterated samples, and rated the other one best of all. Not surprisingly, about half the participants defied their own taste buds and went with the consensus.
Then a sixth participant, also a stooge, rated the wines accurately. Now it was time for the participants to evaluate one another, which some did confidentially and others did publicly. The participants who gave their ratings confidentially respected the accuracy of the honest stooge and gave him high marks, even if they themselves had been browbeaten into conforming. But those who had to offer their ratings publicly compounded their hypocrisy by downgrading the honest rater.
The experiment on academic writing was similar, but with an additional measure at the end. The participants, all undergraduates, were told they had been selected as part of an elite group of promising scholars. They had been assembled, they learned, to take part in the venerable tradition called the Bloomsbury Literary Roundtable, in which readers publicly evaluate a text and then evaluate each other’s evaluation skills. They were given a short passage to read by Robert Nelson, Ph.D., a MacArthur “genius grant” recipient and Albert W. Newcombe Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. (There is no such professor or professorship.) The passage, called “Differential Topology and Homology,” had been excerpted from Alan Sokal’s “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” The essay was in fact the centerpiece of the famous Sokal Hoax, in which the physicist had written a mass of gobbledygook and, confirming his worst suspicions about scholarly standards in the postmodernist humanities, got it published in the prestigious journal Social Text.284
The participants, to their credit, were not impressed by the essay when they rated it in private. But when they rated it in public after seeing four stooges give it glowing evaluations, they gave it high evaluations too. And when they then rated their fellow raters, including an honest sixth one who gave the essay the low rating it deserved, they gave him high marks in private but low marks in public. Once again the sociologists had demonstrated that people not only endorse an opinion they do not hold if they mistakenly believe everyone else holds it, but they falsely condemn someone else who fails to endorse the opinion. The extra step in this experiment was that Macy et al. got a new group of participants to rate whether the first batch of participants had sincerely believed that the nonsensical essay was good. The new raters judged that the ones who condemned the honest rater were more sincere in their misguided belief than the ones who chose not to condemn him. It confirms Macy’s suspicion that enforcement of a belief is perceived as a sign of sincerity, which