One Cheer for Social Conformity
Social Conformity
Social conformity is a huge part of human nature. You probably already know about the famous Asch conformity experiment. People in a room are asked to judge the lengths of different lines on a screen and say which is the longest. In the control condition, everything is normal, and people get the correct answer 99% of the time. In another condition, there are other people in the room who answer first, and these other people all give the same, incorrect answer (they were secretly instructed to do this by the experimenter beforehand). In this condition, most people will at least sometimes give the wrong answer.
Why? The subjects were interviewed afterwards about why they gave the wrong answer. Some of the people were just lying because they didn’t want to contradict the group. Others saw the correct answer but thought that they must be wrong, since everyone else seemed to think a different answer was correct. And a few appeared to have actually seen the incorrect answer as correct (or they were pretending in the exit interview to have done so).
Sometimes, this is used as an illustration of how dumb and irrational people are, and why you should challenge popular opinion. But it’s a terrible illustration of that point (there are much better illustrations!). There was nothing irrational about the subjects’ giving the incorrect answers. It’s obviously much more likely that one person misperceives the length of a line than that multiple people do. That’s true even if the one person is you. This is perhaps why social conformity evolved: it helps you correct your errors and learn from other people’s cognitive processes. If anything, it was the subjects who gave the correct answers who were being irrational.
(Of course, the really rational thing to think was “Oh, it’s a psychology experiment, so the experimenters probably told all those people to give the wrong answers.” But apparently most people didn’t think of that.)
The Bad Side
Everyone here knows about the bad side of social conformity. It leads to things like people going along with human sacrifice, and slavery, and sending other people to concentration camps, and the abuse of other animal species. Sometimes, it seems that people will support any horror, as long as it is part of the current conventions. Social conformity makes it next to impossible to get ordinary people to even consider departing from horribly evil traditions.
Why Conform?
What should a properly rational human being do? Completely disregard all conventions, and judge independently what is the best form of behavior for people to exhibit in each circumstance?
No, actually. This may seem obvious to most people, but maybe it’s not obvious to individualists: it’s actually not a great idea to completely disregard conventions.
One prudential point is obvious: you don’t want to cause other people to react irrationally to you, which is likely to happen because other people are irrationally attached to conventions.
But it goes much deeper than that. Even if you’re interacting with fully rational individualists, there’s still a good reason why you and they are going to want to follow conventions. This reason is perhaps less obvious in our society (where most things are going amazingly well) compared to most human societies in history.
The basic background facts:
Human beings are dangerous. They are by far the most dangerous animals on Earth, and among the most dangerous of all phenomena that you are likely to encounter in your life. It is historically very common for human beings to decide to rob, injure, or kill one another, and they tend to be very good at doing so.
Social conformity is the main thing that stops humans from doing crazy shit. In particular,
a. Most people have very little moral motivation. (https://fakenous.net/?p=2398)
b. Human reason alone is a poor defense against doing crazy shit. (https://fakenous.net/?p=574) Human reasoning tends to go horribly wrong amazingly often, even (perhaps especially) among the smartest people. If you have a very smart person thinking independently about philosophy, politics, or religion (not conforming to societal expectations), it’s almost totally unpredictable what conclusions they’ll come to.
c. Objection: what if you have an extra skillful and benevolent reasoner? Then they shouldn’t come to too many crazy conclusions, right? Problem: You can’t easily recognize these people quickly. Often, a person seems totally reasonable and benevolent for a while, and then you discover some crazy awful view that he holds. Often people are rational about some topics but not others. But when interacting with humans whom you don’t know well, you need to be able to quickly size them up (see point #1).
So, if you meet some fully rational human beings, and you want some productive interaction with them, you’re going to first want to allay the natural suspicion that they have and should have toward you merely because you’re another human. You can’t effectively do this by demonstrating your commitment to rationality (see 2b, 2c). The best way to do it is to demonstrate your social conformity.
The same is true for those other people when they meet you: they should want to allay your suspicion about them. Perhaps you know that they are rational and benevolent, but they don’t know that you know that, so they have to demonstrate their social conformity.
Fortunately, in our society, violence and other rights violations between private individuals are rare (compared to human history). So most people come to a new interaction with a certain basic level of trust. They assume that you’re pretty much like most people (which includes being a conformist), until you do something to disabuse them of that.
I don’t know if this point is intuitively obvious to most people. It wasn’t obvious to me before I spent some time thinking about it. And I think it’s lost on many people with an individualistic spirit. These people might be perfectly rational and benevolent, and they might completely fail to understand why others don’t perceive them that way.
So here are some examples of what I’m talking about. Say you’re going to a job interview. Wear normal, good-quality business attire – or whatever it is that most people do in that situation in that industry. Do not wear some ‘cool’ but weird new hat or tie, or something that expresses your personality. Do not show up with purple hair or a nose piercing. (Exception: if it’s a job that particularly requires a lot of creativity.)
It does not matter if the thing that most people do in that situation is objectively the best thing to do – e.g., it doesn’t matter if the conventional attire is the most comfortable, functional, or aesthetically pleasing. By wearing the weird hat, purple hair, etc., you’re signaling that you don’t care about conventions. Perhaps you’re a totally safe and reliable person, but they don’t know that (again, until they know you well, which will never happen if they don’t trust you after the first interaction). Social conformity is the main thing that stops human beings from doing crazy shit, and you basically just told them that social conventions don’t work on you, so … you do the math.
People have an instinctive fear and distrust of nonconformists. This means that they don’t know why they feel it, so they don’t know when that feeling is likely to lead them astray, and so they won’t correct for those situations. Thus, it may help to behave in a conformist way in all sorts of interactions even when signaling your non-dangerousness might seem irrelevant. E.g., let’s say you want to argue with people on the internet and persuade them of your views. Don’t choose some weird screen name. Don’t call yourself “ChiTownCrispy45” or “Widowmaker719”. Don’t start out by posting weird content that other people don’t do. You’re going to trigger that instinctive distrust.
Or say you’re meeting your girlfriend’s parents. Don’t start a conversation about your most unconventional views. Don’t ask questions or volunteer information that is socially inappropriate, even if those questions/information are interesting or important or entertaining. E.g., don’t start talking about how unjust it is that we have public roads. Don’t tell fart jokes. Don’t ask them what they think the sexiest animal is.
You might think it’s bad that we have conventions whereby we can’t talk about those things. And perhaps you’re right. And perhaps you can talk about those things after they’ve known you for a few years. But at the point that you’re meeting someone, that’s not what matters; the first thing you want to do is make them comfortable.
The first thing that humans need to signal to each other is not “I’m clever & creative” or “I think for myself”. The first thing that a human needs to signal to another human is “I’m not going to do some crazy shit when you turn your back.”
[This has been a public service announcement for my libertarian/individualist friends.]