Does Peer Pressure stifle the acceptance of the obvious?

Message 17: Message 22: I think that your dislike of psychology may simply stem from a misunderstanding of the field, then, if these quotes are any indication of what you really think it is. Unfortunately it seems to be a common misconception - a common lament among psychologists I've known is that whenever they mention their profession to anyone, almost without fail the person responds with some offhand comment about their feelings on Freud. :smacks forehead:In modern psychology Freud essentially means nothing (except for being the stereotype for the field). At best, the portrayal of his ideas and the methods with which he came to his conclusions is that they were unscientific, being mostly conjecture. Due to the rise of behaviorism and an increased emphasis on empiricism since then, psychology has evolved from the more philosophical and introspective way of thinking - attributed to Wundt, Freud, and the other early psychologists and unfortunately a surviving schema - into a science.I suggest just thumbing through a college intro psychology textbook sometime - you might be surprised at what a rich and interesting field it is, and how much real research has come out of it. Much of what we now know about learning, perception and sensation, emotion, disorders, cognition, social behavior, how we know and learn language, human memory and its shortcomings (of particular importance to the courtroom), and so on are discussed with respect to the actual behavior and the biology and neurology behind it. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, "common sense" explanations often fail to accurately depict how the mind really works when tested, so many find themselves surprised by how much of the field isn't nearly as intuitive as one might expect.***Anyway, just to clarify further, Solomon Asch's studies were performed in a much different context than the website mike referenced. In each trial of the original study, he asked a group of participants to judge the lengths of lines. However, in each trial only one participant was an actual subject - the rest were working for him. They were placed into a room together and asked to announce their judgment of the lengths of several lines (one at a time, with respect to three other lines). Those who were working for him were prepared ahead of time with incorrect answers to the test. 33% of the actual subjects conformed to these incorrect answers, even if there were several inches of difference between the lines.Stanley Milgram later conducted a similar experiment that tested not the pressure to conform, but the pressure caused by those in positions of authority - I think it might be of some relevance to this discussion, as well. You can find a short description of it at Wikipedia here. As a matter of fact, anything on the subject of crowd behavior (groupthink, deindividuation, or group polarization in particular) might help illuminate the issue.I think that it is clear that peer pressure can stifle the acceptance of the obvious. I would be cautious in drawing any quick conclusions, though - in most cases, I think, especially with regards to younger audiences, peer pressure comes from both sides.