 Most engineers prefer Fourier series, but personally, I like to march to the beat of a different sum. So on the last full thunk episode, there was one comment in particular that really got to me. Niccardo, thank you. There have been several thunk topics, which I've really struggled with, not necessarily because the subject material was particularly difficult, but for precisely this reason. They kind of conflict with my core values. I get uncomfortable when I'm in a group which constantly reaffirms its own values, regardless of how universal those values are. If I'm in a group which uniformly agrees that genocide is awful, I have this impulse to stop and ask myself, or maybe everyone else. Is it really so bad? I mean, yes it is, but the act of asking that question is really important for me. It probably has something to do with me being extraordinarily stubborn and loving attention, and it's a constant sort of grief for my friends, but I genuinely believe that that impulse is a good thing for anyone to have. But first, let's examine the merits of the opposite impulse. The word conformity has a negative connotation in American culture, which highly values individuality and personal freedoms, but the pressure to conform is part of the reason that you and I can have this conversation to begin with. Social conformity establishes context for social interaction. Communication of any form requires a sort of mutual understanding of convention, which just wouldn't exist unless there were hundreds of people in your life telling you what you should or shouldn't do. Beyond that, social convention and the pressure to conform helps to define a space where people can feel comfortable and not have to be on their guard against other people. It's harder to determine if you can depend on someone you're passing in the street to obey the social convention of not stabbing you and taking your stuff, if they're behaving in a manner inconsistent with other social conventions. And that's not something to be scoffed at. Comfort isn't just a luxury for people with nice cars. It frees up mental space so that you can think about other stuff. I mean, would you be watching YouTube right now if you were locked in a cage with hungry tigers? So, I'm not knocking conformity in and of itself. Conformity is absolutely necessary for civilization to keep on ticking. However, thoughtless conformity, conformity without sincere critical thought about what is being sacrificed and why, I think that is how you get genocides. And unfortunately, it looks like our brains are totally wired for it. Many famous and infamous psychological experiments in conformity have been performed since the start of the 20th century. Unfortunately, experimental psychology is really difficult. And many of those studies have come under fire for flawed methodology or overreaching conclusions. But there's still some pretty convincing evidence that people will frequently act against their own best judgment if they're in a crowd. One of the best and most robust demonstrations of the social power of conformity was an experiment by Solomon Ash in 1951, where test subjects in a group were asked to match a line segment to one of identical lengths from a set. The catch was that the test subject was placed in a group of actors pretending to be test subjects who were sometimes instructed to uniformly respond with a wrong answer. While some of the genuine test subjects initially expressed some disbelief or attempted to convince others of their point of view, the majority would just begin answering the same way that the actors did, that is incorrectly. A similar study later performed by Deutsch and Gerard, which allowed people to secretly record their answers in writing, showed that few were actually convincing themselves that the rest of the group were correct. Instead, they were simply agreeing with everyone vocally while still holding a private belief that the answer was wrong. However, just that much is enough to raise concern. If each individual who sees a problem is cowed into silence because they believe they're surrounded by people who don't, there could be a huge contingent within a crowd who would otherwise form an opposition. But they would never know about each other. Another way our brains push us towards conformity is by trusting ideas that we've heard before more readily. If our peer groups believe something, then hanging out with them and hearing their opinions makes it much more likely that they'll become our opinions. That's not necessarily a bad tendency. If your fifth grade English teacher and your college friend and your next door neighbor all think that something is a good idea, it makes sense to consider it a little bit more seriously than something that some random person just shouted at you on the street one time. It's also not always a bad thing to trust the judgment of a group over your own, especially if that group has access to knowledge that you don't. Unfortunately, our brains don't really differentiate between one person saying the same thing over and over again and a group of people agreeing with each other. Kimberly Weaver's 2007 paper demonstrates that if one person in a group says the same thing three times, people assume the same breakdown of opinion in the group as though three separate people had stated that opinion. So if you get off a train in Boston and hear one person say I like cheese over and over again, you think to yourself, huh, a lot of people in Boston like cheese. By appealing to that flawed psychology, a vocal minority can make it seem like a whole bunch of people believe something simply by repeating it over and over again and thereby compel people to conform to that opinion. Our brains do weird things around other people. It's hard to think critically for ourselves when we have so many reflexes to agree with whatever prevailing opinion surrounds us. Fortunately, there are a few things that we can do to combat those reflexes, to make sure that we're not discarding judgment just for the sake of fitting in. First, just having one sincere voice in opposition to consensus does a whole lot of good. It breaks the illusion of uniformity of opinion unless people who would otherwise just quietly wonder if they were going crazy know that, no, they're not just imagining things. Note that I said sincere. Research shows that simply playing devil's advocate doesn't reliably cause people to rethink their position because the objection is just seen as due diligence on the way to everybody agreeing with each other. Second, taking a little time to consider a question in depth before answering insulates us a little bit from the needric desire to agree with what everyone else says. Practicing withholding judgment can make a habit of not responding until we've had the opportunity to sincerely think it through for ourselves. Third, as with everything, the act of breaking lockstep takes practice. Simply making a conscious effort to call ideas which don't appear to have any opposition into question and work through them carefully can burn new patterns into the brain. And rehearsing being the first one to speak out can help overcome some of the gut-wrenching terror of having a potentially unpopular opinion. And finally, exercising skepticism, questioning and dismantling the assumptions that are fundamental to one's worldview is a great way to find niggling details in the party line that you don't agree with. I mean, it's easy to repeat the standard spiel of your chosen community, but if you didn't come up with it yourself, there's the chance that you're just going along with the crowd. Have you ever found yourself championing a viewpoint that you never thought you'd get behind? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to blah blah subscribe, blah share, and don't stop thunking.