If you were in a room with 100 other people, and were asked the following question based on the image below, what line on the right matches the line on the left?
What would your answer be? If you were the last person to respond and the 100 other people all said A, what would you say?
**************
Palm Sunday is the week before Easter. It’s the day that Catholics hear the Passion of Jesus, the story of his final days before crucifixion. As the history goes, Pontius Pilate didn’t want to be the one to condemn Jesus to death. He washed his hands of the responsibility by putting it to a vote among a very large crowd of people. The loud voices in the crowd called for Jesus’s death relentlessly, despite Pilate even asking “What has this guy done to you?” Still the crowd chanted on and the story goes on the way we all know.
Even as a young kid I remember thinking to myself, I wouldn’t have been calling for Jesus’s death, why did so many want him to die?
**************
History is loaded with stories of conformity and redemption, and this certainly includes the scientific and medical community.
For the first 40 years of the 20th century, the Southern United States battled a fierce disease know as pellagra. Pellagra was known for the 4 D’s: dermatitis, diarrhea, dementia, and death. It is estimated the disease affected over a million and a half people (including children) and killed hundreds of thousands. For years and years it was considered to be an infectious disease.
Who was most affected by the disease? Several groups: Orphanages, Prisons, impoverished communities, and mental asylums (filling up with dementia patients)
But not for the work of a Dr. Joseph Goldberger, Pellagra could have devastated much of the entire nation. Goldberger looked at various places int he south and was convinced that Pellagra wasn’t a contagious disease but was caused by an insufficient diet in those it affected. For example, one type of place that was most effected by pellagra were orphanages. Goldberger couldn’t reconcile why all of the children were infected but the adults and caretakers were not, despite being in constant contact with all of them. Goldberger was a target of harassment and intimidation by a myriad of other politicians and scientists at the time. The questionable ethics surrounding some of his experiments notwithstanding, he was convinced that a mere change in diet would reverse any pellagra in affected patients, and he had data showing just that. As more of his experiments were denied, he went so far as to infect himself and his wife to prove his hypothesis. He survived this experiment, but passed before his life’s work could be finished. He found a clear link between nutrition and the disease, and eventually after his death a vitamin and amino acid deficiency was found to be the cause (and cure) to pellagra.
It seems like the medical establishment at the time took the convenient approach to a disease that primarily affect disenfranchised people. What if a man like Goldberger has not spoken out against a wall of opposition?
***************
I can’t answer the question as to why people conform. But of only a handful of historical certainties, you can count on conformity of the masses to be one of them.
Today’s expert can very easily be tomorrow’s fool (or worse yet, fraud).
The top image of this post is from The Asch Conformity Experiment. By this point you probably know how the results turned out. The vast majority of subjects not in on it picked the wrong line simply because that’s what everyone else picked.
Mr. Keating poetically illustrated the importance of trusting in your beliefs in spite of the face of great unpopularity. The minute will falter on that, we choose the wrong line.
Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this glimpse into my thoughts, please share this with someone else who may enjoy as well.