Just Going Along

I'm sure almost everyone has been in a position where they knew the right answer but went along with the group even though the group was clearly wrong.

It's called GroupThink and it goes a long way to explaining how folks make some very drastic mistakes.

From The Frontal Cortex...

The best demonstration of groupthink in the lab is still the Asch conformity experiments from the 1950's. The basic Asch paradigm is pretty straightforward: a subject is seated around a table with nine confederates who are actually "working" for the psychologist. The group is shown a series of cards containing lines of different lengths:
Each group member was then asked a variety of question about the lines, and told to indicate out loud which lines were longer than the others and which were the same length. The confederates, who gave their answers first, were told to give the wrong answer to several questions. For instance, they might insist as a group that the shortest line was actually the longest. This was the groupthink condition.

When no group pressure was present, subjects almost always gave the right answer - it's not particularly difficult to determine which line is the longest. However, when the subjects were first exposed to a wrong answer endorsed by the group, they provided incorrect responses on more than 35 percent of the questions. 75 percent of the participants gave an incorrect answer to at least one question.

A more recent version of the experiment...