"They must be right. There are four of them and one of me."

A classic demonstration of social psychologist Solomon Asch's Conformity Line Experiment. In these experiments, groups of participants were asked to match the length of lines on cards - the solutions being obvious. But each group consisted of one genuine participant, while the rest of the group was secretly instructed to provide the wrong answer. On average, one-third of the genuine participants conformed to the group and agreed with an obviously wrong answer. In control studies where there were no secret instructions or peer pressure, the genuine participants gave a wrong answer less than 1% of the time.

It's surprisingly easy for individuals to conform to false group think, even when the truth is obvious. How many fringe political beliefs arise out of this social phenomenon? Probably too many.