A closer look
Muzafer Sherif locked people in a pitch-black room, shined a stationary dot of light on the wall, and exploited a visual glitch called the autokinetic effect, which makes the dot appear to move. When asked individually how far the light moved, people gave wildly different answers. But when put in groups, they unconsciously compromised, eventually forming a collective delusion of exactly how much the entirely stationary dot was drifting. It brilliantly demonstrated that humans are so desperate for a shared reality that we will invent a social norm out of literal thin air just to agree with each other.
