Is there a real free will, are we controlled or is it something in the middle?
We know about deep learning, or at least most of us do have a notion of it, and how it controls our choices on internet, showing us the trending products on shopping websites, controlling our feeds on Facebook, even our results on search engines like google. But what If I tell you that maybe it's a human trait introduced on Comp. Science?
In 1950's, Solomon Asch, a psychologist, made a group experiment which consisted in gathering actors and one real subject in a room. People had to choose one between three lines and say which was bigger, the actors, at the beggining of the experiement, pointed at correct answers to gain the subject's trust. After a few questions later, the actors begun to lie and choose the wrong answer, the subject, trying to fit in the group, went along with the actors's choice. This was known as Asch Paradigm.
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The Asch Paradigm was showing a human trait of conformity, which is it a well known trait nowadays and this theory has even more strenght since the internet. But can we just use this to explain the voting behavior?
I know it's a simples concept and widely accepted, futhermore we are sick of seeing our friends and family aware of the their choices being just a sugestion from someone else, because he has good points or just said it with confidence. On the other hand, don't we are acting a bit too crazy in a nation conspiracy? I mean, we know about the conformity, and also we do know its limits. The human has a free will, hasn't it?
next post I'll talk about free will in phylosophy and try to bring an psychologic experiment
image: Wikipedia commons