Toward the end of Defying Hitler, his extraordinary memoir of the rise of Nazism in Germany, Sebastian Haffner describes how the Nazis had “made all Germans everywhere into comrades.” This, he argued, had been a moral catastrophe. This emphatically was not because comradeship was never a good thing. To the contrary, as Haffner was at pains to insist, it was a great and necessary comfort and help for people who had to live under unbearable, inhuman conditions, above all in war. But Haffner was equally adamant that, in normal times, in ordinary civilian life, comradeship became a vice, for it relieved people of “responsibility for their actions, before themselves, before God, before their consciences. ... Their comrades are their conscience and give absolution for everything, provided they do what everyone else does.”

Anyone who was ever bullied in a schoolyard, or, more to the point, anyone who ever joined in the bullying or just stood by while it was going on, knows full well where that feeling that no blame attaches to you if you are doing what everyone else is can lead. You end up doing, or at least condoning, things that you would never do solo, and that you have a hard time justifying once the crowd disperses and you are on your own again.

Recapturing these scruples—at once the burden and the blessing of individual consciousness—does not mean moving from the utter conformity of the crowd to its polar opposite, an absolute nonconformity. To be a true nonconformist is rare, which is probably just as well, since absolute nonconformity would mean rebelling not just against some particular convention, but rather against all convention, and, by extension, all continuity with the past. Taken to this extreme, nonconformity becomes the moral equivalent of economic autarky—self-sufficiency taken to the point of nihilism, and few travel down that road (our modern pose of nonconformity is another matter).

In contrast, the fall into something approaching absolute conformity seems to be an ever-present possibility for almost all of us. The experiments of Stanley Milgram at Yale in the 1950s, which appeared to show that people would all too readily obey authority figures and commit acts that (though faked by the experimenters) appeared to contravene people’s deepest moral values, are widely remembered. But the so-called Asch Paradigm, which derives from a series of experiments conducted at Swarthmore College during the same period by the social psychologist, Solomon Asch, is at least arguably even more troubling.

Asch gave two groups of subjects a standard vision test together—e.g. as a group. In the control group, the test was straightforward. The researchers simply administered the test and noted the results, making no effort to influence the responses. Each subject replied in turn, with all being allowed to hear their fellow subjects' responses. On the rare occasions when an incorrect answer was given to a given question, there was no evidence that any others in the group changed their own answers as a result. In contrast, in the other group, the researchers planted subjects who were instructed to give some false answers to the questions in the test. When at least three people gave such answers, a significant percentage of the group—up to 75 percent, depending on where in the order of those responding they were placed and how many of them there were—followed suit, providing not just an incorrect response but the same incorrect response.