A French study shows that the majority of people will conform –agree with the prevailing opinion– even when it’s factually wrong. This is correlated to certain brain activity, which suggests that people have a “conformity” or “sheep” mechanism that is biological.

However, all such conclusions suffer from the “chicken or the egg” problem –that is, do we behave as we do because our brains dictate it, or does our freely chosen behavior create certain kinds of brain activity? While it’s probably both, I find that’s it too mechanistic to reduce everything to biology. This is what the whole medical model is based on in psychology –people are depressed because of their brain chemistry. Even if this is true, it’s also provable that we can change our brain chemistry without drugs

In any case, this is yet another study that shows that most people tend to conform, though this one is not as malevolent as the Milgram experiments, where people were willing to administer (what they thought were) electric shocks to test subjects for giving the wrong answer.

http://www.truthout.org/012709F