Solomon Asch’s famous 1951 experiment247 revealed the occasional ludicrousness of conformity. When told to compare a line with three other lines—one obviously the same size, one obviously shorter, another obviously longer—about one-third of the participants selected the clearly wrong option, all because others in the group, confederates working with the researcher, gave the wrong answer also. The experiment has become a classic example of how willingly people follow the crowd, even when the crowd is leading them off a cliff’s edge. When asked why they conformed in this way, participants said they were worried about being seen as “peculiar.”248 That is, they didn’t want to be considered weird.

But less well-known is a variation of the experiment in which Asch introduced yet another confederate—this time one who gave the right answer alongside the crowd trying to mislead the main participant. Having just one person who broke with the majority reduced conformity among the participants by up to 80 percent.249 The participant in those trials must have felt like he and the other dissenter could at least be weird together. Shockingly, participants were less likely to conform even if the dissenter disagreed with the crowd, but was still wrong. It didn’t even matter what the dissenter thought, only that they appeared to give the participants permission to disagree. “Defiance per se, the explicit flaunting of a majority’s claim for truth, significantly reduces the grip of conformity on observers,” write Benoit Monin and Kieran O’Connor, regarding some of these follow-up Asch studies.250

This liberating element of alternate viewpoints has been replicated in other studies,251 and it underscores the value of having a diverse array of people around to poke holes in the prevailing idea.

The reason why minority views are so potent, according to research on persuasion,252 is that in certain circumstances, people tend to scrutinize a minority viewpoint more carefully.253 When we hear a dissenting view, we think more critically about what we’re hearing. Listening to a minority viewpoint prompts, in the listener, a consideration of information about different sides of an issue. Majorities, meanwhile, spur us to think only about data that supports the majority perspective. As the researchers Charlan Nemeth and Jack Goncalo put it,254 “Minorities stimulate more originality, while majorities stimulate more conventionality of thought.”

Finally, studies show people in the minority tend to support diversity more than people in the majority do. People who are in the minority see differences of opinion as a benefit, rather than a drawback.255 Not only do people with weird opinions help open up the group to new perspectives, in other words, they also help it embrace other weirdos.