Tag: Conformity

WEIRD People Don't Value Conformity

WEIRD People Don’t Value Conformity

Posted on by jabittan
When we teach kids in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) countries, we don’t teach them in the same way that people in other countries, or in other times, teach and have taught their kids. In WEIRD societies, we are less focused on conformity and tradition and more focused on helping kids express their own uniqueness and work through challenges and problems in their own way. A fun example of this is the parenting style of the Turtle Crush in the movie Finding Nemo. Crush’s son splashes out of a fast moving current of water, scaring the titular character’s father, but not worrying Crush. The turtle is patient and waits to see if his son can figure out how to get back into the current on his own and he praises his son when he makes it back. Rather than chastising his son for falling out of the current and giving him specific instructions and directions for remaining in the current and getting back to the current, he encourages his son to find his own path and figure things out on his own.
 
 
The movie presents this style of parenting as optimal and praiseworthy, but it likely doesn’t resonate in every part of the world, and certainly wouldn’t resonate for humans from the past. For much of human history people have lived in relatively small tribal groups where elders made decisions that younger people were expected to follow. Obedience to authority was much more important in these tribal groups. This is a key idea that Joseph Henrich writes about in his book The WEIRDest People in the World:
 
 
“The willingness of WEIRD people to ignore others’ opinions, preferences, views, and requests extends well beyond peers to include elders, grandfathers, and traditional authorities. … WEIRD people don’t value conformity or see obedience as a virtue that needs to be instilled in children. They also don’t venerate either traditions or ancient sages as much as most other societies have, and elders simply don’t carry the same weight that they do in many other places.”
 
 
In the United States, when we think about ourselves relative to other countries, and when we think about religious groups within the United States relative to non-religious groups or elderly people relative to younger people, we should remember that values around conformity, tradition, and respect for authority matter a lot. Much of the difference and friction we see in the world today, I believe, has to do with the destruction of traditions and the near iconoclasm that WEIRD societies and people are not afraid to inflict on things that are old. We encourage kids to find their own way, be their own person, and to solve problems themselves. Consequentially, this has meant that younger people today in WEIRD countries are willing to throw out traditional ideas around marriage, gender, and elderly authority. We don’t value conformity, but instead value individual expression and uniqueness, and that is a very weird WEIRD way to view the world.
False Conformity & the Big Lie

False Conformity & the Big Lie

Posted on by jabittan
“[Sociologist Michael] Macy and his colleagues speculate that false conformity and false enforcement can reinforce each other, creating a vicious circle that can entrap a population into an ideology that few of them accept individually,” writes Steven Pinker in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature.
 
 
Pinker’s book was published in 2011, but the quote above seems to me like it could be describing the phenomenon we have been witnessing in the United States since the 2020 election. After Donald Trump lost the election, he pushed the false claim – now referred to as the Big Lie – that the election was rigged and stolen. Through the primary elections of 2022 we have seen that the Big Lie continues to have substantial signaling power among Republican voters and many Republican candidates for office have seemingly endorsed the Big Lie or shown themselves to be sympathetic to the Big Lie.
 
 
From the outside, this seems like a difficult thing to understand. But when you step into the shoes of a Republican candidate who wants to win an election and think about the quote from Pinker, the situation starts to make more sense.
 
 
It is likely that most of the candidates who are running for office do not truly believe that Donald Trump won the 2020 election and that it was stolen from him, but they believe that others do, or at least that enough of their voters do, for them to support the idea. I would suspect that many of them don’t want to have to go on record to support what is clearly ludicrous, but by fervently showing that they have bought into the Big Lie, they can win voters and protect themselves from those voters at the same time.
 
 
Pinker continues, “why would someone punish a heretic who disavows a belief that the person himself or herself rejects? … to show other enforcers that they … believe it in their hearts. That shields them from punishments by their fellows – who may, paradoxically, only be punishing heretics out of fear that they will be punished if they don’t.”
 
 
Republican candidates may fear that they will be punished for not supporting the Big Lie. So they buy in and begin punishing those who haven’t bought in. Their false conformity feeds into real enforcement of the Big Lie. It creates a cycle where no one can step out and disavow the Big Lie, even though many of them likely understand how absurd the Big Lie is.
Social Influencers

Social Influencers

Posted on by jabittan
Donald Trump frequently employs a rhetorical strategy built on the power of social influencers. We pay attention to what happens around us, and adjust our behaviors and even our beliefs relative to the groups that surround us. When we are around people who cuss a lot, we might cuss more. When we are around people who exercise every day, we might start exercising more. Whatever the trend in the groups of people around us, we follow suit, learning from the social influencers in our company. What President Trump does is use suggestive language to indicate a trend or a social movement that may not exist. The president frequently says things like, “many people believe,” “lots of people are saying,” or “most people think.”

 

President Trump doesn’t live in a world governed by reality and when he uses the rhetorical devices listed above, there is almost never any actual substance to his claims. But nevertheless, his statements can be influential. He is taking advantage of our susceptibility to nudges based on social conformity.

 

In Nudge Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler write about this approach toward nudges. When people employ these techniques, the authors write, “they try to nudge you by telling you what most people are now doing.” The nudge works because we care about people around us and want to doing what others are doing. We might not want to admit it, but we follow the cues of social influencers and pick up on what the majority opinion is.

 

We want to be in the know and keep up to date on trends and news so that we appear to be good allies to the people in our tribes. We want to be like others so that they empathize with us and want to help us if we ever need it. Doing what most people do, emulating what most people determine to be socially desirable will help ensure that we have people around who have resources to help us. This is why it is so powerful for advertisers, politicians, and people in positions of authority to tell us what most people are doing. We don’t want to be an outcast, and if most people are moving in a certain direction, then surely we should as well.
Conforming to What We Think People Expect

Conforming to What We Think People Expect

Posted on by jabittan
This last election season was not a great one for political polls. The presidential election polls were off for the second straight presidential election, leaving many with doubts about the effectiveness of polling. Many state senatorial polls were also off, leading to expectations that were not met by the actual election outcomes. I spent a lot of time listing to the 538 Politics Podcast heading into the election and spent a good amount of time thinking about and reading about likely election outcomes. In the end, the election was within the expected range of the polling average, but toward a tail end, and it left many people asking why we spent so much time thinking about polling, setting our expectations in certain directions, and whether polls are a useful exercise at all.

 

The reality is that polls are important, and they reflect a part of our psychology that is always in action, even if we are not actively sampling American’s for their views.

 

Politicians are often criticized for changing their positions, but in reality, we all have fluid positions on everything regardless as to whether we are thinking about what clothes we like to wear, marginal tax rates, and whether current public health measures are effective or just for show. Politicians, like all of us, are eager to conform to majority, but they don’t always have perfect polling on what is the most preferred course of action or opinion. Our recent polling experiences show us how difficult it can be to figure out what the majority want. As Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler write in Nudge, “in part because people think that everyone has their eyes fixed on them, they conform to what they think people expect.”

 

The difference between most people and politicians is that politicians really do have more eyes on them than any average person. Their efforts to figure out what people expect is more visible, as are their changes in opinion or stated beliefs. But like politicians, most of us are trying to figure out what people expect of us, and most people are trying to match those expectations (at least in most areas). We are not actually in everyone else’s heads, but we can talk to them, observe the stickers they put on their cars, read their social media posts, and get an idea of what other people believe and what they think is cool. We can do our best to emulate that example, and the spotlight effect puts pressure on us to conform to that inferred identity, belief, or behavior.

 

We don’t actually know what everyone thinks and believes. We can all follow trends and fads (like the Paleo Diet) that we don’t really like, but that we think everyone else likes and expects us to follow. We are all trying to figure out what everyone else thinks, and find a way to go with the flow for most aspects of our lives. For most of us, we are not really being watched all the time while this process plays out. But for political figures, this process can be very public and highly scrutinized. So even though our polls have had some frustrating misses the last few presidential cycles, accurate and timely polling is important. And while we might not like the idea of a flip-flopping political figure, we probably all prefer a political figure who understands what their constituents want and expect, and polling can be a helpful way for them to better understand their constituents and better adjust to their views while representing them.