by Sam Sommers
However, let’s also consider a more troubling side of our tendency toward conformity: namely, its role in poorly conceived political decisions, military atrocities, and even mass murder. We’re quick to dismiss such behavior as the result of aberrational personality—the misguided handiwork of a select few bad apples. But that’s WYSIWYG talking. That’s just letting ourselves off the hook from having to consider the broader contextual and institutional pressures that contribute to such malfeasance. In reality, often the apples aren’t hopelessly bad—the barrel itself is rotten.
Because for every Cameron Hughes out there using the power of crowds for wholesome fun, there’s the cult leader or dictator who has learned to manipulate the same principles out of less admirable motivations. Our propensity for conformity helps keep society running smoothly, but it fuels more nefarious and destructive plots as well. As we’ve learned from the movies, even when it comes to crowds, the force always has a dark side.
UNWRITTEN RULES
Much of daily life is governed by norms. They’re the societal expectations that determine appropriate behavior—the unwritten rules we follow to remain community members in good standing. As the frequent traveler can attest, specifics vary by culture, but all cultures have them in one form or another. Norms are what dictate how we behave in large audiences. How we react to the gaudy Father’s Day present that we know will never see the light of day. How much personal space we give an intimate other, an unacquainted conversation partner, or the person in front of us at the ATM.
The better you are at recognizing norms, the more smoothly you navigate social settings and the better you are able to manipulate them. For example, Cameron Hughes makes his living rewriting the rules of group conduct, emboldening his fellow sports fans to break through the restraints that typically guide public behavior. So to truly understand the human tendency for conformity, first we have to understand the ubiquity and consequences of norms.
Despite their pervasiveness, we don’t talk about norms all that much. They’re usually relegated to the province of social commentators or the comedian who poses rhetorical “Did you ever notice . . .” questions. Entire entertainment dynasties have been built on the simple idea that the exploration of norms is uncharted territory. At its minutiae-focused best, Seinfeld was a twenty-three-minute weekly discourse on social norms: After how many dates are you obligated to break off a relationship in person? Which special occasions do and don’t require gifts? Which calls are too important to be made via cell phone? What’s the appropriate way to dip a chip? And so on.
This wasn’t a “show about nothing,” as its creators, critics, and fans touted. It was an analysis of the ins and outs of daily interaction, of the mundane social experiences rarely deemed worthy of exploration in front of a mass audience. It was a show about norms, not nothing.
More recently, Seinfeld’s cocreator, Larry David, has taken this theme even further on HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm. Curb is all about what happens when we violate norms. The violations are almost always perpetrated by the show’s protagonist—the eponymous David playing an exaggerated version of himself. In one episode, Larry declines a tour of a friend’s house, saying, “I get it . . . it’s bedrooms, bathrooms . . . you don’t need to walk me around.” In another, he withholds candy from adolescent trick-or-treaters because they aren’t in costumes and, to his mind, are too old for Halloween.
The comedy derives from Larry’s willingness to do what most of us wouldn’t dare. But you have to admit, his responses carry a certain appeal. I mean, how many tours can you take before houses all start to look the same? As Larry suggests before pondering the prospect of forty-year-olds on the prowl for candy, “There’s got to be some kind of cutoff, shouldn’t there be, for Halloween?” But unwritten rules dictate that we accept all tours when offered and we reward all trick-or-treaters. Violation of these norms carries clear consequences—in Larry’s case, an expletive-laden ejection from the untoured house and the November 1st toilet-papering of his property.
In real life, the repercussions of breaking with norms range in severity from simple awkwardness to social exclusion. Consider the small talk of daily conversation. By adulthood, most of us have learned that the casual acquaintance who asks “How’s it going?” does so in the way of simple greeting, not as a request for an annotated response. The range of appropriate replies is quite narrow, spanning from “OK” to “good” with a midpoint of “fine.” The respondent who launches into a long-winded answer risks a quizzical reaction, a strained interaction, and—in all likelihood—no more than a silent wave the next time paths cross.
Conversational norms have more important lessons to teach us as well. The first time I ever testified in court as an expert was at a murder trial in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, in 2008. The crime had received national media attention: Christa Worthington, a white fashion writer from a wealthy family, had been discovered stabbed to death, her two-year-old daughter clutching her lifeless body.1 Several years later, Christopher McCowen, a black garbage collector with an IQ below 80, was convicted of the murder.
I testified in a post-trial hearing examining allegations of racism against several of the deliberating jurors. The potentially biased statements were, on their surface, descriptive in nature. One white juror, in referencing the extent of the victim’s injuries while deliberating, had allegedly exclaimed that this is what happens “when a two-hundred-pound black guy beats on a small woman.” Another had voiced anxiety at sitting so close to this “big, black guy” in the courtroom. But race was more than a mere descriptor in these statements, contrary to the claims of the prosecutor and the jurors themselves. Understanding social norms is what allowed me to testify to that.
The norms of conversation dictate that we include in our statements that information which we deem relevant to the point we’re seeking to make.2 We typically avoid stating the obvious or dwelling on details that everybody already knows. In the McCowen case, no one in the jury room was confused about the accused’s race—there was no need to differentiate him from another defendant. So why did the jurors say “black” when talking about how dangerous McCowen was? For the same reason they said “big”: they saw his race as relevant to this conclusion about danger, regardless of their willingness to admit as much to the judge or even to themselves. Otherwise, why mention the obvious?
These jurors’ statements are little different from, say, a complaint about Hillary Clinton’s diplomatic performance phrased as follows: “This is what happens when you send a female secretary of state to the Middle East.” Everyone already knows that Clinton is a woman, so “female” is no innocuous descriptor—our hypothetical critic must see gender as relevant to Secretary Clinton’s on-the-job effectiveness.
The McCowen jurors’ violation of conversational norms revealed something about their personal attitudes. Similarly, the prosecutor’s decision to begin my cross-examination with the unexpected question “Doctor, do you mind if I ask how old you are?” betrayed his motivations—namely, to rattle me and impugn my expertise. I don’t think either goal was accomplished: I said that I didn’t mind the question as long as I could ask him the same one in return; the judge then implored us to move beyond the issue of age by interjecting that the surgeon who had examined his knee the week prior looked to be fresh out of high school. Then again, the judge did ultimately side with the prosecution after the hearing, so who knows?
The bottom line is that whether parsing sitcom dialogue or murder trial transcripts, norms and their violations shed light on human nature. We don’t take lightly this breaking with unwritten rules. Doing so carries a variety of costs, from embarrassment to stilted interactions to pariah status. And recent neuroscience research indicates that the experience of being ostracized in a group—even something as trivial as not having the ball thrown to you enough during a game of catch—triggers activity in the very regions of the brain associated with the sensation of physical pain.3
Norm violation and its ensuin
g rejection hurts, sometimes literally. Going with the flow—conformity—is often the least painful course of action. As a learned expert once told me, there’s nothing worse than starting a cheer and no one joins in.
ASCH’S LINES
Take a look at these lines. Which of the three on the right—A, B, or C—matches the solitary one on the left? Easy, right? C. And more than 98 percent of people tell you so when you ask them. (The other 2 percent? They become NBA referees.)
Now change the situation.
Instead of judging these lines on your own, in private, imagine that you’re seated at a table with five other people. Shown a series of line charts like this one, the group goes around giving responses aloud. For the first few charts, everything proceeds as expected. But on the chart above, a funny thing happens. The first person says, “A.” You blink. Maybe you chuckle to yourself and figure she just didn’t take a good look.
But then the second person also says, “A.”
And the third and the fourth, too.
Now it’s your turn. What do you do? Do you stick to your guns and break with the group, giving the answer you know to be right? Or do you just go along with everyone else—you know, why bother ruffling feathers?
I know, I know. You’d give the right answer, you say. You’re not afraid to think for yourself.
But I don’t believe you. Or, more precisely, I don’t believe three-fourths of you. Because when Swarthmore College psychologist Solomon Asch conducted this very study decades ago, recruiting actors to assume the roles of the myopic fellow group members, a full 75 percent of participants went along with the wrong answer at least once.4
In a nutshell, that’s the pull of conformity. Our tendency to go along with the precedents others establish is ingrained enough that three-quarters of us would give answers that we know to be incorrect before we’d go against the clear consensus of the group. Being wrong is easier than breaking rank.
You might be thinking that there are aspects of the task Asch created that make it a unique situation. That’s true. There isn’t much at stake here for participants—there are no real repercussions to giving the wrong answer or saying one thing but believing another. Respondents may have just decided that life is too short to spend part of it arguing with strangers about lines.
Fair enough. But this tendency toward the path of least resistance is not without problematic consequences in real life. When we give in to the group just to make life easier, we sacrifice personal preference in the name of group consensus. We forsake comfort for fashion. We take up risky behaviors and reckless habits that we’d otherwise steer clear of on our own.
And don’t underestimate the strength of the social pressures even in a low-stakes setting like Asch’s study. Photos of the participants depict expressions of perplexed wonder—they seem to find the task fairly stressful. Moreover, a few paragraphs ago, when I asked whether you’d give an incorrect response in this study, think about how confident you were that you would not. Even without direct consequences, few of us are comfortable with the idea of making obviously inaccurate statements in public (insert your own politician joke here). But this is precisely what most of Asch’s respondents opted to do, demonstrating just how powerful the pressures to conform are.
It turns out that our tendency to go with the flow is not limited to situations where we want to avoid making waves. Sometimes people around us shape not only public behavior but also our private thoughts. Like when you don’t know the right answer. Say you’re asked to estimate not lines but rather the length of the Mississippi River. If you have no idea how long it is, but everyone around you gives confident, converging answers, it would be logical to adjust your response accordingly. In fact, even if others’ responses are all over the place, using them to guide your own calculations makes sense. This is the thesis of James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds, namely that the averaged estimates of groups tend to be more accurate than those of individual experts.5 As Surowiecki suggests, it’s why contestants on Who Wants to be a Millionaire typically do well to poll the studio audience and go with majority opinion.
In this manner, there’s also an informational component to conformity. Sometimes we use other people as a source of knowledge, just as we do when we encounter the ambiguously prostrate passenger in the crowded subway car. None of the other commuters are alarmed? Then it must not be an emergency. Everyone at the table says that the Mississippi is at least two thousand miles long? Then I’d better tweak my own estimate of five hundred, no matter how big a fan of Mark Twain I fancy myself.
In an experiment in this vein, individuals were seated in a completely dark room for what they were told was a vision test.6 Several feet in front of them, a small point of light shone for a few seconds. Their task was to estimate how far the light moved. Some said as much as nine or ten inches; others thought just one inch. In reality the light didn’t move at all, but without any reference points in the dark room, it sure seemed like it moved. So participants’ estimates reflected their subjective take on a visual illusion.
Over the next few days, researchers brought these same students back to the dark room, but this time in groups of three. Asked to complete the same task—judge how far the light had moved—participants gave their answers out loud, one by one. Over time, responses converged within groups. Before long, everyone in the group was in general agreement that the light was moving somewhere in the neighborhood of two to four inches. Absent a visual marker to orient their perception, individuals turned to a different, more social reference point: the people around them.
SO CONFORMITY CAN ALSO come from a desire to gather accurate information. But that’s not what happened in Asch’s study. There was nothing ambiguous about his lines, yet respondents still went along with a wrong answer. Here, the conformity wasn’t informational in nature but rather grew out of a simple motivation to fit in and adhere to group norms. These participants just wanted to avoid rocking the boat.
As you’ll probably expect me to say by now, there was nothing remarkable about these participants. They weren’t individuals particularly susceptible to conformity; it was the situation, not some sheeplike personality trait that dictated their actions. How do we know? Because when Asch varied aspects of his experiment—when he made just subtle changes to the context—respondents’ behavior changed dramatically.
For example, much of the power of Asch’s situation derived from the unanimity participants encountered. The finding that 75 percent of respondents conformed at least one time emerged when every last person around the table agreed on the incorrect response. When just one actor broke from consensus, participants felt liberated to do the same: suddenly fewer than 10 percent conformed. In fact, even when the lone dissenter voiced an incorrect response different from the wrong answer given by the rest of the actors, the participant’s conformity rate still dropped.
Holding firm to our independent beliefs and tendencies becomes easier—or, at least, less difficult—with some semblance of an ally. It’s empowering to see someone else go against the norm. It’s liberating, actually, as arena acolytes of Cameron Hughes have discovered. A dissenter changes the culture of a group, reshaping its norms. Instead of being unthinkable or intolerable, disagreement becomes merely awkward.
Another crucial aspect of the context of Asch’s study is that the respondents’ decision was a public one. Participants committed to their responses aloud, permitting everyone else to immediately and unambiguously know whether they were adhering to the group consensus. Without such public accountability, conformity should drop dramatically, which is exactly what happened when Asch allowed participants to write down instead of voice their line-judging responses.
These variations on Asch’s original study demonstrate the power of situations to dictate conformity. And though his research took place in the 1950s, the findings were hardly the product of a particular era: forty years later, Dateline NBC conducted the same study in front of hidden cameras and found conform
ity among more than half of the respondents. It’s not an exclusively American tendency, either, as more than 130 variations of Asch’s study have been conducted in at least seventeen different countries.7 If anything, average conformity rates are lower among American and British respondents than among non-Western samples from Japan, Hong Kong, Ghana, and Zimbabwe. In other words, the conformity Asch observed emerged in spite of traditional American values like independence and individualism. In cultures with a more collectivist, communal orientation, the tendency to go with the flow can be even more pronounced.
Conformity is so ingrained that we often practice it without trying to, as when we mimic others’ nonverbal behavior. In one study at New York University, individuals were paired with a conversation partner who made a habit of either shaking his foot or rubbing his head. Without realizing it, participants started to mirror this repetitive behavior.8 There’s good reason for this tendency, which the researchers labeled the “chameleon effect”: in a follow-up study, they found that the more someone adopts our mannerisms during conversation, the more we end up liking her.
We get so used to conformity smoothing out our social interactions that we sometimes do it on autopilot. There’s a scene in When Harry Met Sally when Billy Crystal’s character relates to a friend at a football game his angst over his wife’s decision to leave him. For a cinematic depiction of a platonic male friendship, it’s an unusually intimate conversation. And right in the midst of this tête-à-tête, as Harry is sharing the most personal details of his emotional devastation, both characters stand up and sit back down mindlessly as the wave circles the stadium crowd. Three different times. Their conversation doesn’t miss a beat.