[Portan]

I'm a math teacher and I saw a weird hivemind effect recently. A student was showing a proof, but I felt one of the steps seemed wrong (I wasn't sure). So I asked everyone else if it was right. They responded with a chorus of "yes" "of course" and a little laughing. Eventually the proof ended up showing something that was not true. So I went back to that step and again asked for confirmation. Again most of them agreed. I wrote the formula to be sure: log(A+B) = log(A) * log(B). Eventually one student with a different text book had looked it up and found it's wrong after all. How had most of the others been so confident that it was right? Surely they hadn't actually learnt it wrong. They must have been making their decision on some other factor, perhaps the fact that all their vocal classmates agreed.

At least they weren't giving negative feedback to the one who made the original mistake though. So I guess he won't continue to make worse mistakes as this article suggests.

[anindyabd]

The students were conforming. As this paper [1] explains, people -- especially young people -- will often answer incorrectly in order to gain social acceptance:

"...the group answered incorrectly on purpose; it appears that when we are unsure of how to perform a task or how to behave, we may take comfort in agreeing with a large number of other people."

[1] http://www.personalityresearch.org/papers/lumbert.removed

[rndn]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments

[ScottBurson]

Well, it looks almost right. I can see someone just learning about logarithms being confused about where the + and * go.