In a college psychology course, my class studied an experiment.

This is an oversimplification, but the experiment went as follows. A group of college students was shown a paper on which a six-inch line was drawn. The paper was passed to the students sitting around the table. They were asked to estimate the length of the line. Now, this experiment was rigged. The instructor and all but one of the students were told to say, "About three inches." Again, the line was clearly longer than three inches.

The point was to determine whether these obviously wrong guesses would cause the unsuspecting student — the one not in on the scheme and the last one at the table to offer a guess — to also say, "About three inches." In the overwhelming majority of cases, the unsuspecting students also said, "About three inches."

Now there are a few ways to look at this. But one explanation is that the consensus, though clearly wrong, altered the way the final student viewed the length of the line, as in, "If everybody sees it that way, I must be wrong."

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