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Fun stuff from the Annals of Improbable Research: a study indicating that people are more conformist after being shown a photo of an accountant than after being shown a photo of a punk rocker.

The authority figure asked each of the confederates how many beeps they'd heard. Each of these co-conspirers gave a pre-arranged - and wrong - total.

Now, at long last, the innocent dupe had to speak up. How many beeps had she or he heard?

The innocent dupes who had seen the photo of an accountant fudged their answer. They acquiesced to what everyone else said. The dupes who had looked at a punk rocker did not.

Like many studies, this one builds on an existing foundation. Pendry and Carrick acknowledge owing much to a 1996 New York University study about innocent dupes who were shown a list of words about elderly people. The words included: old, lonely, grey, retired, wrinkle, ancient and cautious. The scientists, armed with a stopwatch, discovered that dupes who had seen those words walked away more slowly than dupes who had not.