Status quo trap 1: Conformity

Why we keep doing what we’re told when we should think for ourselves

This week kicks off the new series on the "status quo traps” I announced last week.

The first trap I look at is conformity - our tendency to obey social influence, even when we shouldn’t.

The trap of conformity

A few years ago, my wife and I spent an afternoon with a couple who, like us, had recently become parents. The subject of early education came up. The father, an executive at a large bank, said they were eager to send their child to preschool as soon as possible. He felt this would prepare her for “the routine of school and work to follow.”

This was said with good intentions. Yet, it’s a particular script of what should be expected from life: ceaseless routine, traditional education, and a career that follows conventional standards. Did he consider this the best path or an inevitable one? I didn’t ask. It’s certainly not an unusual one. It’s what most of us do; it’s the norm.

And there’s nothing wrong with travelling along the typical route in life. Unless it’s not the best one for you. That is the trap of conformity, and it’s worth resisting.

The expectations of parents are a form of social influence. And children conform when they change their beliefs and behaviours based on this influence. Parents, more than most, appreciate the benefits of early conformity. (And suffer through the phases of nonconformity). The child benefits too. Social guidance reveals what is true about the world and what they need to gain the approval of the tribe.

Trusting parental advice keeps children in touch with reality and avoids risks such as poisoning, accidents, and collisions. Following some basic rules handed down to them keeps them safe. So, they learn to avoid swallowing unknown objects, jumping from heights, and playing in busy streets. Disobeying these instructions may be the last rule they break.

And it’s not just about preserving their physical well-being. When they act in line with the expectations of the tribe, they gain their respect and avoid disapproval. They escape the harm caused by disobeying the rules of the social world. So, they imitate our beliefs, adopt our religion, and share our worldview. They learn that good kids do as they’re told.

So far, so good. Learning about the world and gaining the favour of our tribe is vital to our development. And social influence is one of the only ways to obtain these early in life. There are other good things to say about conformity, but there are other places to say them. This post is about the dark side of conformity: our impulse to conform to the social status quo against our best interest. Humans tend to conform naturally, making it easy to reap the benefits. However, resisting the dangers of conformity takes deliberate effort.

Children grow up, and as they do, the sources of social influence become more numerous: friends, schools, workplaces, and online communities become their new tribes with their own rules. Ideally, they also develop ways of judging the quality of these rules and the courage to challenge those that are false or harmful. But the evidence suggests we rarely follow this ideal. Instead, we keep doing what we’re told when we should think for ourselves.

The problems of conformity

An unreliable route to reality

Conformity isn’t a reliable guide to what’s true. It can even make us ignore the evidence that’s right in front of us.

In a set of famous experiments in the 1950s, Solomon Asch asked a subject to match the length of a particular line to three comparison lines on a white card. The task was easy. One comparison line was clearly a match, and the others were obviously different. The subject was placed in a group of seven to nine confederates (people working with the researcher) who, unbeknownst to the subject, were instructed to answer correctly on some trials and make errors on others. In the first rounds of the experiment, people all chose the correct answer to this simple task. But when the confederates all purposefully started making an obviously incorrect judgment, the subjects began doing the same. Overall, 70% of people conformed to a wrong judgment on at least one trial. And the total average error rate went from <1% without the erroneous social influence to 37%.

The main finding is that even if we have an apparent reason to believe the group is wrong, we may still concede to social influence. In the decades since this first experiment, results from over 100 studies in 17 countries have corroborated this conclusion.

Yet, the important facts about life are rarely as easily obtained as matching lines of similar lengths.

Do humans cause climate change?

Do vaccines cause autism?

Do carbs make you fat?

These questions are important; a correct answer helps us avoid everything from an expanding waistline to an uninhabitable planet. But they rely on more than just the simple evidence from our senses. They require proof that takes effort (and often expertise) to gather and evaluate. And unfortunately, another finding from the Asch studies was that when judgments are more complex, we are more likely to conform.

This may explain why conformity has been linked to various questionable ideas, including conspiracy theories and spreading fake news. It’s not a simple judgment to figure out if there really is a powerful group of people that are secretly working towards a malicious goal or whether Donald Trump’s grandfather was a pimp and tax evader and his father a member of the KKK (which I’ve learned is the most viewed Facebook fake news story of 2019). But millions believed this, not based on some deep investigation themselves, but because their tribe does.

What is clear is that the views of our particular group shouldn’t be the default truth we mindlessly accept. In a post titled “The evidence-based life”, biologist Richard Dawkins offers a perspective on how we can temper our tendency to conform:

In advocating evidence-based life, I don’t of course mean we should do double-blind, statistically-analysed experiments before making a decision, or before believing anything. Life’s too short, and there are many other reasons why it would be impractical. But it is worth imbibing the spirit of evidence-based medicine by being deliberately aware of possible sources of bias. Have I looked even-handedly at the available evidence or did I under-value or even ignore evidence that contradicted my prior beliefs? Or evidence that might have contradicted the beliefs of my tribe (religion, political party, favourite opinion-leader etc)? Do I read only the Guardian and ignore the Telegraph? Or vice versa. Do I watch only Fox News and ignore CNN? Do I tune out when exposed to news, or views, that contradict my prior prejudices? Are my views on climate change (vaccination, Covid-protection masks) based on the best available evidence, or are they coloured by political or religious prejudice, or tribal loyalties of some kind?

Yes, life is short, and we can’t jump down every rabbit hole to confirm every fact the world throws at us. But when these facts affect our beliefs and actions, we should be critical of those that arise from social defaults. There are better ways of getting to the truth.

This advice contains another clue about how conformity inhibits our ability to learn what’s true: limiting the options we’re willing to consider and the questions we’re willing to ask. Good decisions, in fact, all decisions, depend on us considering a set of possibilities and choosing the best amongst them. Conforming to social influence confines us to one option - the popular one in our group.

A form of self-betrayal

Even if conformity doesn’t always provide accurate information, surely gaining the acceptance of our group remains a worthwhile aim. Here too, the case for conformity is overstated.

To understand why, we should consider the internal reaction to social influence. Social psychologists distinguish between two ways that we conform. Acceptance occurs when we internalise the information and have a real change in opinion. However, compliance is an act - when we hold a different view but comply to avoid the social penalties of dissent. During the last few years, some wore a mask because they believed it limited the spread of Covid; others wore them despite scepticism about their effectiveness. The former accepted their efficacy, and the latter group complied.

We don’t just comply when we distrust the truth of facts but also when we doubt the value of subjective norms. Consider some examples of widespread norms:

• The expected life: the expectation mentioned earlier, that we follow the typical steps in life: go to school and get good grades to go to university to get a respectable and traditional career. Marry and have kids, retire at 65. This may work for some but is limiting to others. Not everyone wants to live this way, but it’s typical of what society expects.

• Respecting authority beyond their competence: we may look to people with money or fame to know what to believe and how to act. And we follow their advice in areas where they aren’t competent to provide the advice in the first place.

• Consumerism: the impulse to define yourself by what you own and to keep acquiring more to boost your social status.

• Avoiding stigma: People stay in unhappy marriages partly because of “what people will say”. We may avoid seeking help for mental issues due to the perception that it signals weakness, especially in men.

Perhaps most damaging is when we live dishonestly to avoid social penalties, only to find out there aren’t any. Stoic philosopher Seneca famously said: “We suffer more in imagination than reality, “ which is true of many closet nonconformists. A 2001 study shows how true this statement is. When imagining the reactions of others to our social blunders, intellectual failures, or embarrassments, people reliably overestimate the social penalties they will receive from others. We also exaggerate the social rewards we’ll receive when we display our success in apparent ways. In “The Psychology of Money”, Morgan Housel recounts a letter he wrote to his son when he was born:

You might think you want an expensive car, a fancy watch, and a huge house. But I'm telling you, you don't. You want respect and admiration from other people, and you think having expensive stuff will bring it. It almost never does especially from the people you want to respect and admire you.

The cost of compliance is a less authentic life. Tragically, we often realise this too late. Ronnie Ware is an Australian palliative care nurse who spent years caring for patients in the last weeks of their life. She wrote a book on their final reflections titled “The Top Five Regrets of the Dying”. The top regret? Wishing they dared to live a life true to themselves and not the life others expected of them. Avoiding social discomfort in the short term leads to long-term regret. In his book “Who not How”, Dan Sullivan puts it starkly: “Someone once told me the definition of Hell: The last day you have on earth, the person you became will meet the person you could have become.”

Who made the rules?

That conformity is a poor guide for living isn’t surprising if we consider who made these “rules” that we so easily follow. Steve Jobs shared this reflection in an interview :

When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and you’re life is just to live your life inside the world.

Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money.

That’s a very limited life.

Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.

Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.

We don’t need to share an ambition for building the next tech giant to appreciate the freedom this perspective provides. Unlike the rules of physics, there is no objective and verifiable truth to social rules about how to live your life. They are entirely made up. And those who made them did so without a single thought about you. They weren’t made to apply to your unique situation, wants and desires. And often, the people we copied them from don’t even know why they follow these rules. And those who made them don’t have to live your life weighed down by social influence.

Often social trends don’t arise from the “wisdom of the crowds” or even the wisdom of credible experts. Instead, as Cass Sunstein explains in his book “Conformity” large-scale social movements, where people end up having similar beliefs or behaviours result from a few early movers that set the ball in motion. These “cascades” take only a few people to start off, but they influence many who mindlessly follow, believing that all other followers are acting with unique knowledge. But who are these early movers, and how credible are they? Likely no smarter than you.

Conformity weakens group functioning too

So far, I have presented the case against individual conformity. There are also reasons to resist its influence in groups. I’ll briefly mention some of these in the context of a business.

It’s impossible to imagine a business where no one conforms that functions well. The deference to the authority of management creates stability and cohesion. But wholesale conformity creates problems.

There are obvious instances where organisations with high levels of conformity create bad outcomes. For example, when instructed by an authority figure in the company, hiring managers may discriminate based on race without question. But the other effects are more subtle but no less powerful.

As with individuals, conformity limits the number of arguments to choose from in teams. If a company vision is based on the view of one or a group of like-minded people it’s easy to be deluded into ignoring other options. I’ve sat in strategy meetings where all effort was spent admiring the one route to success without considering the countless unexplored paths. A healthy degree of dissent enlarges the range of options to choose from.

We should also regard the source of norms within a business with some scepticism. Authority is a powerful amplifier of conformity effects, and businesses are a case in point. When a senior leader expounds a belief or norm, we will likely accept it without question. And these ideas live on as mantras passed on to new employees as fact, even when they are wrong or outdated.

Sometimes even well-intentioned norms, such as kindness in the workplace, can have unintended negative consequences unless challenged. More than once, I’ve been in a position where I’ve interviewed internal candidates for a role who had no chance of getting the job. But rejecting the application outright would be a breach of the implicit organisational social norm of kindness. Instead, we go through the motions pretending the candidate is interviewing on an equal footing while we know someone else is getting the position. I’ve also seen this explained to candidates who are unlikely, and sometimes reluctant, to get the new role as “showing management that they are ambitious”. But it’s all a show and a waste of time. We could do better by claiming honesty as a higher norm over the facade of kindness.

Like in other contexts, organisational conformity must be balanced with a healthy dose of dissent.

When conformity is law

Laws, rules, and policy. These formalised versions of conformity impose not only social but legal penalties for those who disobey. And something about them seems more solid, more sacred than other social norms. Breaking the law carries a greater sense of wrongdoing than singing in a library.

But why?

I have more to say about this in the upcoming book. For now, I’d like to express some reservations about the notion that laws are unquestionable through some brief observations.

One prominent but under-appreciated feature of laws is that we are born subject to rules we had no choice in selecting. Some of these rules no one alive today created, yet we follow them like they are the law, which they are.

At some point, people made up these laws, and as Jobs reminds us, they may have been “no smarter than you”. They should be subject to the same scrutiny as other forms of conformity. The fact that they differ so widely from place to place must mean some lawmakers were smarter than others. The diversity in worldwide laws about abortion is just one such example.

The reasons for laws are also suspect. In the 2015 US Supreme Court decision to recognise a federal constitutional right for people to marry a same-sex partner, Chief Justice Roberts objected to the decision noting that heterosexual marriage has been around for “millennia” all over the world: “…the Court invalidates the marriage laws of more than half the States and orders the transformation of a social institution that has formed the basis of human society for millennia, for the Kalahari Bushmen and the Han Chinese, the Carthaginians and the Aztecs. Just who do we think we are?”. While Chief Justice Roberts’s opinion did not sway the result, remarkably, the best reason why we have specific laws may be because they are what’s always been done.

This isn’t a pro-anarchy argument for breaking the law and suffering the consequences. But we should be willing to scrutinise laws with the same standards as any other norms. Bob Dylan put it more poetically: “To live outside the law, you must be honest.”

Confronting conformity

I’ve presented a case against conformity. It may seem a short leap to conclude I am for non-conformity. Well, sort of.

I don’t believe the goal should be a non-conformist. It should be to have accurate beliefs and avoid the self-betrayal of public compliance. If reason and authenticity pull us toward non-conformity, then that should be where we make our stand. Contrarians oppose popular opinion simply because it’s popular. Rational nonconformity is a rejection of ideals that are false or unfitting. It’s a means to an end, not an identity in itself.

All of this is easier said than done. Choosing to conform or not is a calculation with objective and subjective factors. We may each weigh these differently in deciding how to live. But we should all be more sensitive to the false allure of social influence, and more daring in our opposition to it.

***

We didn’t stay in touch with the parents I mentioned at the beginning of this piece. Our eldest daughters are both still preschoolers. And we can only wonder to what extent they will conform or rebel against our expectations. But should our daughter choose a “road less travelled”, there is a lesson in a biographical story by writer William Zinsser that I hope will stick with me.

Originally I wasn’t meant to be a writer. My father was a businessman. His grandfather had come from Germany in the great immigration of 1848 with a formula for making shellac. He built a small house and factory in a rocky field far uptown in Manhattan—at what is now 59th Street and Tenth Avenue—and started a business called William Zinsser & Company….For a business to remain in the same family on the same Manhattan block for more than a century is rare, and as a boy I couldn’t escape the naggings of continuity, for I was the fourth William Zinsser and the only son; my father’s fate was to have three daughters first. In those Dark Ages the idea that daughters could run a business as well as sons, or better, was still two decades off…. It was a ready-made future for me, and my father looked forward to the day when I would join him. But inevitably a different day arrived, and not long after I came home from the war I went to work for the New York Herald Tribune and had to tell my father I wasn’t going to carry on the family business. He accepted the news with his usual generosity and wished me well in my chosen field. No boy or girl could receive a finer gift. I was liberated from having to fulfill somebody else’s expectations, which were not the right ones for me. I was free to succeed or fail on my own terms.

Indeed. The greatest gift we can give others, and ourselves, is to be free to succeed or fail on our own terms.