The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - September 10, 2026


＂12 Angry Men,＂ Asch's Conformity Studies, & the Lindsay Clancy Hold Out Juror (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_1045)


Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

142.45

Word count

985

Sentence count

39

Harmful content

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.320 Hi, this is Gad Saad. I wanted to spend a few minutes talking about the Lindsay Clancy case.
00:00:09.000 For those of you who don't know, this is the woman who killed her three children,
00:00:13.800 then went on trial for the triple killing.
00:00:19.080 11 out of the 12 jurors voted to render her not guilty due to insanity.
00:00:29.160 and then one holdout said no she is guilty and so I wanted to spend a few minutes
00:00:36.140 talking about this one truly heroic holdout and I'm not saying here heroic
00:00:43.900 in terms of me pronouncing a judgment as to whether she's guilty or not although I think
00:00:50.360 she is but rather about how difficult it is for someone to withstand the type of pressure that
00:00:58.480 he would have likely been under. And I'd like to explain that incredibly strong psychological
00:01:08.000 mindset by linking it to my favorite movie of all time and my favorite psychology experiment
00:01:16.420 of all time. So let's begin with movie. I began my PhD, not my PhD, my MBA in 1988 at McGill
00:01:25.960 university and during the first year we have to take an organizational behavior course as one of
00:01:31.480 the you know required courses of the first year and in that course at one point we were
00:01:38.440 asked to watch a movie 12 angry men 1957 greatest movie of all time where there are these 12 jurors
00:01:49.280 The entire movie takes place in a room with the incredibly intense dialogue between the 12 jurors
00:01:57.160 who are trying to decide about the guilt or innocence of a young man who had just committed a murder.
00:02:06.960 And in this case, it's reversed the dynamics.
00:02:11.660 11 out of the 12 say that he's guilty, you know, throw away the key.
00:02:16.780 and then one guy played by Henry Fonda says wait a minute I want to talk about this and as spoiler
00:02:23.620 alert as the movie goes on you see how he's able to hold his ground and then flip each of the 11
00:02:32.860 people you really should watch this movie because it speaks to group dynamics you know a fundamental
00:02:40.160 feature of organizational behavior, of any behavior involving multiple people, is how
00:02:46.980 people interact in a group, in a group dynamic setting, especially when there is such pressure
00:02:52.620 to conform. And yet Henry Fonda's character held out in a truly incredible way. So you can see how
00:03:01.180 that movie very much, you know, art in this case is mimicking real life, you know, 65 plus years
00:03:11.420 later. That's number one. My favorite psychology experiment of all time is the Solomon Ash
00:03:18.600 conformity experiments. This is where Solomon Ash wanted to demonstrate that you can get people to
00:03:25.060 conform in otherwise astoundingly insane settings where they shouldn't be conforming. And so what
00:03:33.020 he did is he showed people three lines of different lengths, and then he put another line
00:03:38.320 next to the three, which is clearly the same length as one of those three. And then he's going
00:03:45.800 to ask people which of the three lines is the same length as the other line. So which of lines
00:03:52.200 ABC is the same as line X. And there's really only one clear answer because the lines are
00:03:57.820 sufficiently deferring in length. There's no way short of you being congenitally blind
00:04:02.340 to not be able to tell which of the three lines is the same as X. The first seven people are
00:04:08.700 confederates, meaning that they are, they're pretending to be really participants, but
00:04:13.940 unbeknownst to the eighth participant, they're really in on the experiment. Each of the first
00:04:18.380 seven goes up and gives an answer out loud, and they give the wrong answer. And then the point is
00:04:25.700 to see what happens to the eighth person, who then either can say, are you insane? Of course, 0.93
00:04:31.740 that's the wrong answer. And here's the right answer, or whether that person acquiesces and
00:04:37.180 conforms to the, you know, to the group. Now, the reason why that's an incredibly powerful experiment
00:04:43.260 is multiple, multifold. Number one, it demonstrates an astoundingly profound insight about human
00:04:52.560 nature, the capacity to conform and not believe your lying eyes. And it does so using a very
00:05:00.660 simple and elegant design that you could explain to a 10-year-old. And this is what I always
00:05:05.500 explain to my students. You don't need to have a very fancy experimental design to identify
00:05:13.120 a phenomenon that is truly powerful about the human condition. Now, of course, group conformity
00:05:19.780 can be found in endless examples. So when I discuss that study, I then say, well, look,
00:05:24.360 fashion is nothing but a group conformity experiment. Somebody says today brown is in, 0.55
00:05:30.060 well, everybody rushes out and buys brown. Okay, it's no longer brown, it's blue. Okay,
00:05:35.940 all peons get out there and buy blue now. And so, so many things in life are about conforming to
00:05:42.320 group expectations to group norms and so on so again imagine that you can get a sizable number
00:05:51.760 of people to conform in the group in the solomon ash experiment imagine now thinking back of the
00:06:00.140 12 angry men movie where you have this one incredibly intense character who's unwilling to
00:06:07.740 yield to the pressure of the other 11 that are putting truly undue pressure. And now you can
00:06:13.620 appreciate how much of a principled person that one individual who stood out in the Lindsay
00:06:21.840 Clancy story. There you go, people. This is, by the way, I love to do these types of analyses
00:06:26.840 because if you look at this clip, today's clip that I'm doing, I'm taking an ongoing real case
00:06:35.040 that just happened that has gripped the nation i'm linking it to a cultural product films i mean
00:06:42.680 films are powerful because if if they're powerful they're saying something about the human condition
00:06:47.700 and then i'm linking it to a great experiment in the history of psychology take care everybody cheers