Jocko Underground: The Trickery and Power of Group Influence. Moving Out of California? Telling White Lies. Helping Others Through Burnout

The Asch Experiment. Measuring conformity in groups. Moving out of California for better a better business situation? 56 y/o starting Jiu Jitsu tips. Helping a friend through burnout. Telling white lies on an application to join the Marines. Should I pursue football if I already got cut from the team in college? Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jocko Willink?

  This is the Jocko Underground Podcast number 16 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Also joining us tonight, Daryl Cooper. So here we go. Good evening to you guys, whatever. Alright, so I was reading, I don't know, I don't know what particular wormhole I was down in this situation. But I was reading this, I ended up reading this article, something called the Ash Experiment, run by a psychologist named Solomon Ash. I want to say this is like 19, early 1950s when this went down. And so we ran an experiment, which experiments are kind of underrated. And I think they used to be able to get away with all kinds of stuff. This one isn't bad, but they clearly, maybe that's a good, maybe that's a good one for,

• 0:44Jocko Willink?

  for the unraveling podcast. Just look at some gnarly psychological experiments. They're out there.

• 0:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, our medical experiments, we could get into Tuskegee.

• 0:54Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's freaking nasty.

• 0:57Speaker 01

  Feel a little bit of national shame for a moment.

• 1:00Jocko Willink?

  That's a horrible, horrible one.

• 1:03Jocko Willink?

  Alright, so this experiment was set up like this. They had eight people in a room. Seven of the people are actors, or they call them Confederates in the psychological word, but they're actors. And one person out of these eight is the subject of the experiment. And so then they get, they get asked a question in this, this particular experiment, what they did was they, they had, they described it as a vision test or a perception test. And they had a line by itself. And then there was three lines separated, separated from it, but near it. And they were of different lengths and they were numbered one, two, and three. And you'd look at the line that was by itself.

• 1:44Jocko Willink?

  And the question was, which of the other three lines is the same size as the line that's by itself? So it's a real simple, straightforward test.

• 1:53Jocko Willink?

  And that's what they do. And they'd show them a bunch of different lines and a bunch of different other lines. And then they'd ask one at a time, they would ask, okay, which one is it? Is it one, two, or three? And they'd go down the, the, the seating, right? So they're all sitting at a desk, like a, like a long desk. They're all sitting there facing these lines. They put up the lines and then they go left to right. All right, what do you think? And it's an actor. And what do you think? It's an actor. They, all the actors answer first and then they have the actual subject of the experiment. So sometimes the, the actors would all give the wrong answer. And

• 2:36Jocko Willink?

  when they did that, guess what happened? Thirty something, thirty-two, thirty-five, thirty-seven percent of the time, the subject would give the wrong answer too. He would just get influenced. When they, when the actors gave the correct answer, there was only one percent, it was actually less than one percent deviation. Less than one percent deviation. But when the actors, you know, when the, when the, when the correct answer is, you know, line number two and all the actors go, oh, line number three, line number three, line number three, line number three, they'd get to the subject and the subject would go, yep, line number three.

• 3:12Jocko Willink?

  Thirty-five percent of the time. When it's, when it's, and, and I saw the images, it's not,

• 3:20Jocko Willink?

  it's really clear. There's, there's not much difference. There's not much, uh, not much debate about which one of these lines is like this. Or which one of these lines is the correct answer. So

• 3:32Jocko Willink?

  and they got asked multiple times. And so seventy-five percent of the subjects, so seventy-five percent of the subjects conformed at least one time. So almost everybody that went in there, seventy-five percent, at least one time conformed.

• 3:47Speaker 01

  Oh, they were doing it over and over.

• 3:48Jocko Willink?

  They did it over and over. They asked, you know, ten, they'd show you ten things.

• 3:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:53Jocko Willink?

  And, um, and then here's another point on this. When they ran the same experiment, but they would have one of the actors out of the seven, give the correct answer, that was enough to drop the percentage down to only five percent instead of thirty-five percent of, of conformity.

• 4:15Jocko Willink?

  So they get done with the experiment, they did some interviews with the people. And what do you got so far DC? Anything, anything so far?

• 4:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I got a couple of things that are very interesting about this, about this. I guess questions that I have about it. One is the fact that whenever they run any of these psychological experiments, these post-war experiments where they're kind of trying to really trying to figure out how Germany happened, right? That's really what they were trying to figure out. Was it conformity? Was it some like rooted darkness in like the heart of mankind that emerges under certain circumstances is that you have to disguise the experiment in order for the experiment to work, right? If you were to tell these people, listen, so you know, these people are going to say, you can't do it that way.

• 5:00Jocko Willink?

  That would not work.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  And there's an interesting thing that goes to self-awareness here, you know, where if the person is like aware of what it is you're trying to get them to do, then often they'll do the right thing. Because their priority is performing the task that you've set in front of them. Whereas if you can redirect their attention in a way, then their priority reverts to the thing that the mode that we usually operate in, which is making sure that we are aligned with the people around us. And because conformity is not, not always a bad, I mean, it's not usually even a bad thing. You know, that's the, that's the weird thing, right? It's like we look at, like you brought up that book, Ordinary Men, I think you've done it on Jocko podcast before.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  And people have commented on the fact that, you know, you had all these middle-aged gendarmes, German military policemen who had been brought in, were doing horrible, terrible things to Jews in Poland. And the, the reasons that they would, that they gave afterwards, and these were men who acknowledged their criminality, were very open about what they had done, they weren't trying to hide anything, was that the, the impulses that drove them to do the horrible things that they did were very often like pro-social impulses and things that in another context were not necessarily a bad thing. Like you didn't want to leave your friends to do the dirty work alone, you know, you have, if they're going to do it, then you have to do it. It has to be done, so we're all going to do it, that kind of thing.

• 6:24Speaker 01

  You know, wanting to be a part of the group and maybe deferring to the judgment of others. You know, if we're sitting here right now, maybe if it's like a line is two inches and it's, you know, it's. Measuring it against a one inch line, maybe I'd hold my ground or whatever, but there's not necessarily anything wrong with like you guys are right there saying, no, no, no, listen, we're telling you, this is how it is. That I might really think that it's a certain way, like a different way, but at the same time, I trust and respect you guys enough to be like, huh, maybe, maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm wrong. And that's not necessarily a bad impulse.

• 6:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah. So the two things that you just talked about, uh, they, cause when they got done with the experiment, they actually interviewed the people and said, well, what, you know, what were you thinking? Why did you say this? So there was two prominent answers. The, the first one is what you talked about. Well, I guess it's, it's part of what you talked about. Normative, normative influence, meaning I just want to be normal. And if there's a bunch of people that are saying something like, I don't want to stand out. That's, that was most of it. Most of it was that. And then some of it was also what you're talking about. So that is a little excerpt of what we are doing on the Jocko Underground Podcast. So if you want to continue to listen,

• 7:41Jocko Willink?

  go to JacoUnderground.com and subscribe and we're doing this, we're doing this to mitigate our reliance on external platforms. So we are not subject to their control and we are doing this so that we can support the Jocko Podcast, which will remain as is free for all, as long as we can keep it that way. But we, but we are doing this so we don't have to be under the control of sponsors. And we're doing it so we can give you

• 8:13Jocko Willink?

  more control, more interaction, more direct connections, better communications with us.

• 8:19Jocko Willink?

  And to do that, we are, we're building a website right now where we'll be able to utilize to strengthen this legion of troopers that are in the game with us. So thank you. It's JacoUnderground.com. It costs $8.18 a month. And if you can't afford to support us,

• 8:39Jocko Willink?

  we can still support you. Just email [email protected] and we'll get you taken care of. Until then, we will see you mobilized underground.