the eye of Nova's mind

A friend (delosd) lists his opinion on OSBP.

I never thought I'd be in the position where I had to argue for the effects of peer pressure. (Warning: the last link is a .pdf page.)

Of the article, I pointed delosd to this passage:

More disquieting were the reactions of subjects who construed their difference from the majority as a sign of some general deficiency in themselves, which at all costs they must hide. On this basis they desperately tried to merge with the majority, not realizing the longer-range consequences to themselves.

But there's also this:

In one series the size of the opposition was varied from one to 15 persons. The results showed a clear trend. When a subject was confronted with only a single individual who contradicted his answers, he was swayed little: he continued to answer independently and correctly in nearly all trials. When the opposition was increased to two, the pressure became substantial: minority subjects now accepted the wrong answer 13.6 per cent of the time. Under the pressure of a majority of three, the subjects' errors jumped to 31.8 per cent. But further increases in the size of the majority apparently did not increase the weight of the pressure substantially. Clearly the size of the opposition is important only up to a point.

If OSBP had only one person going up to someone asking, "Can I ask to touch your breast?", I would not have put up the argument that peer pressure had anything to do with it. However (and especially in the instance of the girl in the hallway being approached by a group of people [I assume the group was larger than three]), the ability of peer pressure to sway someone's opinion on something, even something they are absolutely sure of in private, is significant and can't be flicked away.