Not Becoming a Pack

School morality and adult morality usually present bullying as a conflict between an aggressor and a victim. In reality it almost always needs an audience that laughs, stays silent, or believes it decides nothing.

Solomon Asch set people an almost comic task: pick the line the same length as the sample. Several participants ahead of them — the experimenter’s confederates — confidently named the wrong one. Some of the subjects joined the obvious error at least once.

The experiment is often retold as proof that people have no will. Asch himself saw a more complicated picture: many stayed independent, some doubted their own eyes, and the presence of even one dissenter changed the situation sharply. Sometimes breaking a unanimous group takes not a hero but a second voice.

Most participants do not consider themselves cruel. They laugh because everyone else is laughing, forward the joke so as not to be next, or deliver a moralising remark to the person the group has already found guilty.

Good causes are convenient for aggression too. A person can be humiliated for his clothes, his food, his environmental habits, his politics or insufficiently correct words. A moral reason gives an attack the pleasant feeling of civic work.

Before making a remark it helps to ask:

• do I want to change the behaviour or punish the person;
• does he actually have a way to fix the situation;
• am I speaking privately or performing for an audience;
• does the scale of the reaction match the act;
• would I do the same with no one watching.

The weaker person is worth defending not because he will one day come in handy in a war against the strong. It is enough that the attack became possible because he was isolated.

A school class is a randomly assembled group. It is under no obligation to contain people who share your values. Failure at school popularity says little about a future ability to be a friend, to work and to love.

But a random group is rich material for observation: who supports the weak, who becomes brave only in front of an audience, who can apologise, who repeats the leader’s opinion, and who keeps his dignity without displaying superiority.

Observing is useful. Turning classmates into laboratory animals is not. They are studying us too.

The second voice is many times cheaper than the first, and it shows in any meeting. While everyone is silent, contradicting the boss means stepping out of line alone. The moment one person says the deadline is unrealistic, it turns out four people thought so and each was waiting to see who would start. The role of the first, meanwhile, goes not to the smartest or the bravest but to whoever has least to lose: the one who has already found another job, or the one who was not going to be promoted anyway.

What follows is not a call to be first, but a more modest observation: silence is read by the group as agreement, whatever the silent person thinks. The audience is not a neutral position but a role whose duties are performed by default.