The Kerry Cascade


  • Share on Pinterest

Duncan Watts revamps some of his Six Degrees content in this article about Senator Kerry.

A few weeks before the Iowa caucuses, Kerry’s campaign seemed dead, but then he unexpectedly won Iowa, then New Hampshire, and then primary after primary. How did this happen?

One answer may be found in a series of psychology experiments conducted at Princeton University in the 1950s. Princeton social psychologist Solomon Asch showed a room of participants a series of slides displaying sets of vertical lines.