Walk with the Wise

“Walk with the wise and become wise, for a companion of fools suffers harm” (Proverbs 13:20).

Note: today’s entry is longer than usual. But, you will want to read the whole entry.

Scriptures have always been clear about keeping good company. Being around wise people absolutely matters. Now, there is good science to back it up. In a book called “Quiet” written by Susan Cain, she cites a brain study that shows why the Apostle Paul wrote, “Do not be misled: Bad company corrupts good character” (1 Corinthians 15:33).

Here is the study:

In 2005 an Emory University neuroscientist named Gregory Berns decided to conduct an updated version of Asch’s experiments. Berns and his team recruited thirty-two volunteers, men and women between the ages of nineteen and forty-one. The volunteers played a game in which each group member was shown two different three-dimensional objects on a computer screen and asked to decide whether the first object could be rotated to match the second. The experimenters used and fMRI scanner to take snapshots of the volunteers’ brains as they conformed to or broke with group opinion.

The results were both disturbing and illuminating. First, they corroborated Asch’s findings. When the volunteers played the game on their own, they gave the wrong answer only 13.8 percent of the time. But when they played with a group whose members gave unanimously wrong answers, they agreed with the group 41 percent of the time.

But Bern’s study also shed light on exactly why we’re such conformists. When the volunteers played alone, the brain scans showed activity in a network of brain regions including the occipital cortex and parietal cortex, which are associated with visual and spatial perception, and in the frontal cortex, which is associated conscious decision-making. But when they went along with their group’s wrong answer, their brain activity revealed something very different.

Remember, what Asch wanted to know was whether people conformed despite knowing that the group was wrong, or whether their perceptions had been altered by the group. If the former was true, Berns and his team reasoned then they should see more brain activity in the decision-making prefrontal cortex. That is, the brain scans would pick up the volunteers deciding consciously to abandon their own beliefs to fit in with the group. But if the brain scans showed heightened activity in regions associated with visual and spatial perception, this would suggest that the group had somehow managed to change the individual’s perceptions.

That was exactly what happened – the conformists showed less brain activity in the frontal, decision-making regions and more in the areas of the brain associated with perception. Peer pressure, in other words, is not only unpleasant, but can actually change your view of a problem.

What the Bible has always taught us, and what science now backs up is that when we surround ourselves with people who normalize sin long enough, wrong company makes what is wrong seem right. And that’s a big problem.

“Walk with the wise and become wise.”