When In Rome

Hopefully this comic won't be too confusing... I didn't realize until I was working on it how many "moving parts" it has. D'oh! It's based on the Asch conformity experiments originally published in the 1950s. The experiment in the comic here is slightly different than the Asch experiment so I could make this punchline at the bottom. If only people knew more about this, I think the penis enlargement industry would be a lot... umm... smaller.

The alternate ending is a pop-culture reference this time.

I know I've done this before... you're out somewhere in a group of people, participating in some activity. All of a sudden you realize everyone else is doing it differently and you start to question how well you were paying attention when the instructions were given. Or maybe you were in the bathroom when new instructions were given out. What's going on?

When I was sixteen I ran into a car on my bike. It was a big yellow four-door sedan. Boxy thing. I know, I saw it as I was rolling over the hood, as I was sliding down the street beside it and then again after I'd rolled to a stop and cracked my head on the pavement I got up and looked down the street and saw the big yellow sedan had turned slightly and stopped down the street. But once they saw me getting up out of the road, they took off. They were probably afraid of being sued -- having no idea that I knew it was my own fault and had no intention of suing them... although really, it is a crime to flee the scene. Don't do it. Anyway one of the gaggle of a half-dozen witnesses came over to me and told me to lie down, so I did. I spent the next hour answering questions to the police and EMTs. Had I been unconscious? No. (You wouldn't know it to look at me, but my head is remarkably sturdy.) Did I know what year it was? Who was the president? Did I see the car that hit me? And every one of those gaggle of about a half-dozen eye-witnesses insisted that the car that hit me had been either a red pickup truck or a black sports car -- not anything even remotely like the car that actually hit me. I got corroboration of that later when I came back to the scene to pick up my bicycle. The woman who's lawn I'd fertilized with my brain-juice had kept the bike for me and she'd actually seen me hit the car and knew it was a yellow sedan too. But the other witnesses were so adamant about the red pickup or the black sports car that she decided not to say anything. But after the ambulance had carried me off, she strolled casually into the street and picked up the silver rear-view mirror that had snapped off as I rolled over it. D'oh!

Do you have a conformity story?

Here's a video of the original experiment.