Swarm Intelligence

McCarthy era in the United States led Solomon Asch (1956), a German

immigrant to America, to ask about the nature of conformity generally.

In his famous experimental paradigm, a subject was led to believe that

the other people in the room were also naive experimental subjects who

were being asked to rate the relative lengths of some lines displayed by

the experimenter (see Figure 5.5). The situation was contrived so that the

real subject always answered last, after the others, who were confederates

of the experimenter. On most trials, the confederates gave the correct an-

swers, but occasionally they would unanimously give obviously incor-

rect ratings ...