From 1941 to 1945, the Nazi’s systematically murdered 6 million innocent people. Looking back it seems absolutely insane that so many normal people could not only allow this to happen, but actively participate in such a horrifying atrocity by, “just following orders.” Hannah Arendt wrote about how people just like you and I can so easily get warped by the forces of conformity. In this essay we are going to be talking about the psychology of conformity and how you can learn to resist its downward pull.
We begin that journey with the infamous Asch experiment, which found how deeply foolish conformity can make us. Here, they’d have a group of people sitting at a table and ask them to compare the lengths of several lines to see which two were of equal length. The trick was that only one of the study’s participants was even a real participant. Everyone else was an actor who was told to lie about which was the matching pair. The terrifying reality is that 74% of participants conformed to the lying actors despite the fact that they could see the lie with their very eyes. Think about what that implies about you. Be honest with yourself, would you have the courage to say what you saw, despite the fact that everyone else was saying different?
You might say, “but that’s just lines! When it comes to real world problems, more people would be able to speak up!”
Well…Dr.’s Franzen and Mader decided to do the exact same experiment, except instead of lines they used real political opinions. They were asked whether or not citizens should receive more liberties, more freedom. When the actors said yes more freedom, 81% of participants said yes. When the actors said no, that dropped to 33%. That means that 48% of people were willing to change their minds about our freedoms as individuals just because a group of strangers said so. In a similar setup, Dr. Crutchfield found that an extra 40% of people agreed that freedom of speech should be taken away when they were socially pressured by actors4.
“But that’s just people in a lab!”
The German citizens who were just following orders weren’t in a lab, and that’s the point. If so many of us seem so willing to violate our own eyes and our own freedoms when we’re sitting safe in a lab, how many of us would be so quick to conform the moment the social pressure had real consequences? I ask you then, do you want to be someone who was just following orders, or do you want to be one of the few who stood up and said no? Becoming the kind of man who can stand his ground is exactly what this substack is about.
Egocentric Teenagers and the Pull of Conformity
So, to understand how to break free from conformity, we first have to understand why it actually happens in the first place. What many don’t realize is that, according to Dr. Robert Kegan, conformity is actually a developmental necessity. He even refers to one teenager as, “an unsocialized, self-interested creature who needs their [parents] behavioural limits.” The idea of an “unsocialized” teenager is very important because it implies that there is a beginning to socialization, or, the process by which we are made to conform to our parents, and to the culture we are raised in. If the teenager isn’t socialized at the beginning of this process, then what exactly is he?
This is what we are as children – egocentric. This doesn’t mean egotistical where we’re really arrogant or an asshole. Instead, it’s more about our ability to understand how things happen. So for example, let’s say you ask a child, “how does the sun move through the sky?” The child will say that the sun is following them7. If you ask them, well does the sun follow anyone else? They’ll say no! It never occurs to them that the sun couldn’t work this way because they can only understand things from their own, limited egocentric perspective. They can explain things only as they relate directly to them.
Now, socialize that kid. Teach that kid right from wrong. Teach that kid social norms, the rules and regulations about appropriate behaviour. How can a child really understand any of that? To adopt social norms and rules a person must be able to set aside their own egocentric desires and think about what society expects of them. How well do you think that kid is going to be able to do that when their problem-solving is – Oh! Oh! The sun follows me through the sky!? Instead, we teach that child to obey social rules because they learn that disobedience, non-conformity, equals fear, ostracism, punishment – pain of some kind. When a child is acting badly, they are punished, and so they learn that if they don’t conform there will be punishment.
This may obviously sound negative, and the way I’ve been framing conformity is as a negative thing. This isn’t necessarily the case. In punishing us our parents are trying to teach us how to be civilized, well-behaved kids because they want us to become adults who can actually navigate the world. Dr. Mark Leary, a social psychologist, has written about how automatic our conformity to social norms is. We might be sitting in a restaurant sharing a meal with friends, laughing and talking loudly, and yet very few of us grab food from our friend’s plates without asking, or wipe our mouth on our shirts, or belch very loudly.
These are all things we do as kids before our parents chastise us into civilization, and most of these things are perfectly fine to conform to. It’s not as if you gain anything by breaking these rules. In fact, many of the social norms we’re socialized into obeying are there for a good reason. As much as you may want to stare at your sexy co-worker’s chest, you also don’t want to make her feel uncomfortable or objectified. Not merely because you fear punishment, but because you actually care about her personhood, you actually care about the fact that she is a human being.
In the process of socialization we aren’t merely learning that breaking these rules means we get punished. Eventually we get to the point where there is a leap in our ability to make sense of the world. There’s a difference between saying, “I follow social norms because I fear punishment,” and, “I follow social norms because I’ve made them a part of who I am and how I think about the world.”
Returning to Dr. Kegan, he’s written about a group of young boys trying to understand the golden rule, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” When the boys tried to explain their understanding it became very obvious that they understood, “do unto others as they do unto you.” You hit me, so I hit you. To understand “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is a leap in the complexity of their understanding. Now I can think what I would want them to do to me in a hypothetical situation, rather than simply this is what they concretely did to me.
To be clear, this isn’t a matter of learning how to empathize with someone else. A child who can only learn through punishment can still empathize with someone and be punished by feeling bad that they hurt someone. However, as we become increasingly socialized we can begin to think more abstractly and so we can actually handle a more complex relationship with other people. You can understand abstract social norms about sexual propriety, and use them to better understand what the consequences of your actions would be on your coworker. In other words, you can imagine more to be empathetic about. As such, you take sexual propriety on as a value regardless of the punishment you might receive if you broke that social norm.
The issue with conformity to these social norms arises when we have to break the social norm. We internalize these social norms so deeply that we assume they are the “natural way of things” and that breaking them is not merely immoral, but unnatural or in defiance of the reality of things.
So for example, the nice guy is someone who has internalized the abstract values about sexual propriety and respect for women so deeply, that’s he actually incapable of breaking them in a romantically intelligent way. I’ve literally even heard of guys who are sitting on the bed with a woman who is practically begging to have sex, and he’s like, “oh no I would never disrespect you like that.”
Often these guys will become close friends with women because they think that’s what they need to do in order to be romantic, and then they just end up getting friendzoned. They believe that women are only interested in assholes when in reality they’re interested in guys who actually make a move, which means they have to risk breaking the rules of sexual propriety. To be clear, that doesn’t mean they disrespect a woman, it just means they treat her in a way that is different from a friend or coworker and in a way in which she would be receptive to if she’s interested.
But why can’t he break these rules? Because at some point he was ostracized or was taught that he would be ostracized if he broke those rules. He learned that he would be punished if he didn’t respect whatever social norms his parents cared about, and then what his teachers cared about, and then what his classmates cared about. How many of us were at the receiving end of “Adam and Eve sitting in a tree.” We were taught sometimes very early that we would be made fun of if we broke the social norm set by our peers – no one should find out you’re attracted to someone.
Notice what’s going on here. We are subjected to an emotionally difficult situation and taught that if we obey the rules of those around us, we will be saved from feeling those emotions again. Over the course of our upbringing we learn that we need to take into consideration the opinions and perspectives of other people so that we can be sure we won’t be punished.
By first caring about ourselves and our own desires to avoid social punishment, we eventually learn to care about the opinions of others. This is how we’re slowly led to that leap in complexity I referred to earlier, where children go from “do unto others as they do unto me,” to, “do unto others as I would have them do unto me.”
Dr. Amsel talks about that specific leap as the ability to think hypothetically, in this case, about what others would think or do. It’s not just that you’re fantasizing in some magical pretend play with witches and wizards. It’s that your hypothetical thinking tracks far more to what would actually happen. As a young teenager you can actually use your hypothetical fantasy to understand and navigate reality in a way that a younger child cannot. It’s simply too complex for them to understand all of that.
Now at this point in your development you’re beginning to see just how much others can understand about you and the consequences that would have on you. You can begin envisioning in your mind how much punishment you’ll receive if you break the expectations that you imagine others have of you. As such there is increasing internal pressure to care about the standards and expectations of others. When you consider violating their standards this produces a degree of anxiety that is only soothed when you conform to those expectations, especially when you get actual real-world approval from others for your conformity. One of the best things a teenager could ever hear is, “you’re really cool, I like you.”
Again, what’s really important to understand here is that it’s not just that you now care about the opinions of others. Even young children cared about the opinions of others. At this point, you almost completely set aside your own wants and needs. You privilege the opinions of whatever group you want to be a part of. You become increasingly susceptible to peer pressure because you’re desperate for your peer’s approval. Any time you feel out of alignment with your group’s expectations and standards you experience that as anxiety, stress, shame, or guilt. You’re motivated by these negative feelings to become more and more like your peers.
You experience these negative feelings as an internal incoherence. Your internal landscape feels chaotic and the only way you can resolve this is by finding coherence from the external world and in the external world. You think, “If I abide by my group’s norms, I am able to solve my internal problems.” Unfortunately, this creates an internal coherence that is dependent on external coherence. The internal compass that is meant to guide you through life, to help you make your decisions, is torn from your own wants and needs, and then placed firmly in the external, into the group you desperately seek to belong to.
By the time you’re an adult you have fully internalized the social norms, rules, and regulations of your group, your culture, your political party, your church, your job. At this point you’re not even able to challenge them because they are just considered the natural way of things. This is the Conformist, the good little sheep that cleaves to the herd. You may also have heard this called herd mentality because they’re incapable of thinking freely, outside of the bounds of the herd.
The Dangerous Reactions to Conformity’s Prison
Now, think about what happens when there is external incoherence. Think about what happens when someone comes along who looks different, acts different, talks different from “the natural way of things,” from all the things that have been conditioned into your very being by all those years of punishment. This causes internal incoherence which you have learned can only be resolved by finding external coherence. You are not merely motivated to conform yourself to the standards of your group, but also to demand that these strangers also conform.
Or worse yet, what happens when your authority figures, the top exemplars of all that your group represents, tell you that all the problems you’re facing are the fault of the people who are different? What happens when you have financial issues, relationship issues, political issues, or religious issues, and your authority figure tells you that the only solution is to punish the strange wrongdoers who have done this to you? You can see how difficult it would be for this person to stand up and say no.
When you realize that your actions have led to the deaths of millions, it’s far easier to deal with that internal incoherence by looking for external coherence in the safe embrace of the phrase, “I was just following orders.” I may not know what was going on, but I know my group must have had their reasons.
Unless you learn to question social norms in intelligent ways, this could be you. If you crumble quickly under social pressure, then the obvious answer is to learn to be more assertive. Unfortunately that’s much easier said than done. Think about what happens when the process of socialization is extremely emotionally painful. For people who were chronically bullied, ostracized, invalidated, raised by strict parents, or who had a strict teacher, they’ve learned that the costs of non-conformity are far too high. The higher the demand for conformity or the higher the risks for non-conformity, the more difficult it’ll be to actually challenge that conformity.
Dr. Leary writes that people who are more sensitive to approval and disapproval are far more concerned about the opinions of others. That seems painfully obvious, but think about what that means for the nice guy we talked about earlier. If he’s very shy or awkward he may have had some very negative romantic experiences. Even if he was never able to work up the courage to make a move, that’s all the more reason to think that romantic failure is going to be especially painful for him. And as everyone knows, if you try to get better at dating, you’re going to have some painfully humiliating experiences.
This is one of the reasons the nice guy is often radicalized into the resentful incel. The tragic irony is that he has been emotionally bound into conformity by the values of sexual propriety. Again, my point is not that he needs to learn how to disrespect women and make them uncomfortable. Instead, he needs to learn how to break that conformity in more intelligent ways, but how can he do that when it’s like he’s being pulled apart by charging horses.
One horse is the fear of breaking norms of sexual propriety, of the consequences of doing so, and of his legitimate care for the woman he’s attracted to. Nice guys actually want to be nice guys, but galloping in the other direction are his desires for intimacy, connection, sex, and the social status that comes with romantic success. Sure he wants to be a nice guy, but he also wants to feel like other men respect him…which often implies that he doesn’t feel that already. Pursuing women unfortunately becomes a way to do get male respect.
To add on to that, Dr. Leary also writes that the higher someone’s status is relative to our own, the more likely we are to care about how they perceive us. Another obvious fun fact, but notice the implication. If we’re that shy, awkward nice guy we are more likely to assume that the women we’re attracted to are higher status than us, which makes us work harder to make a good impression.
Dr. Leary further writes that the more importance we place on someone, the more likely it is that this person will view our attempts to impress with skepticism. When we combine those two concepts of our romantic interest’s higher status making us care more and be trusted less, we can see how the nice guy is in an even tighter bind. Notice also how inferior the nice guy believes himself to be relative to any possible romantic partner. He would be lucky for any of them to finally give him even a friendly smile.
My point in outlining all of that is to notice how powerfully conformity has imprisoned him. He can either be crushed under it into resentful retaliation or be a good little boy and do as he’s told, hoping for the best. The fact that so many develop such a hyper-reactionary hunger for power over others only speaks to the pain of their perceived inferiority.
A Step Beyond the Conformity of the Nice Guy
Rising above that conformity and learning to put himself out there socially is obviously a possibility. But given everything I’ve said about how painful that would be for him, is that really likely if he doesn’t have the kind of social support he needs to do so? Ironically, he would be able to develop enough assertiveness to begin breaking through conformity if he was able to find a good enough group to conform to. Such a group would have him adopt the skills he needed to begin developing enough to assert his own individuality.
So, with all of that being said, how do we actually start breaking our individuality away from conformity? If you haven’t watched it yet, my essay “Keys to the Authentic Self” goes very deeply into what the authentic self actually is and how you can you begin discovering and creating your own authentic self. This step is so necessary because if you want to wrench your compass free from the hands of conformity, you must actually have an idea for where you want to put it and then point it. It may seem obvious that your external compass should become an internal compass, but that tells you nothing about the direction it should be pointed toward.
Secondly, I’d invite you to start exercising your ability to assert yourself. Dr. Leary wrote about how his students would often return from spring break telling stories about how they had adopted a new identity. When they were away from their friends, their families, and their coworkers, the pressure to “be themselves” was much less intense. On top of that, the fact that they were anonymous meant there weren’t as many risks to awkward failures.
My point then, is that you shouldn’t feel like you have to start asserting yourself with people you know immediately. Obviously if you’d like to you can to do respectfully, but the point is that you want to start asserting yourself in whatever small ways you can. For example, if someone cuts you in a line, speak up and politely tell them that the line starts where it does. Most people will likely respect that once they’ve been called out. However, if they refuse, hold your ground and ask them again calmly. The moment you become reactive or angry in any way though, is the moment they’ve won. A good rule of thumb is that in any interaction the person reacting the most has the least power.
If they still refuse, it’s probably best to back down, but do so calmly and with your head held high. Once you’ve risen above social pressure you have already won. It’s not about getting everyone to do as you say, but for standing up for what you believe is right.
That’s another important point. It may be easy to assume that you should cut in front of lines or do other annoying things because that’s really breaking conformity. This isn’t the way. To truly break conformity is to learn to rise above the social pressure that would have you be silent and afraid. Being an asshole is falling beneath conformity. Remember that many of the social norms we have are necessary and perfectly acceptable. The true individual is the one who can learn to identify the unnecessary social norms that hold themselves and others back from being better people.
In the end, learning to rise above conformity begins with learning to handle increasing levels of social pressure. Start looking for those opportunities, whether it’s standing up to someone being a dick or speaking your honest opinion when it goes against what others are saying. My advice for that is to learn to pick your battles. I do not recommend saying things that will get you fired. The point isn’t to say things you know are offensive, but to be able to stand up for your values.
Either way, that is enough for today. Check out my next essay on the necessity of myth that’s available right now. I’d love to hear your thoughts on social pressure and conformity, so join the conversation in the comments below. Thank you so much for your time and attention. Please stay tuned for more and I wish you all the best on whatever journey you find yourself on.
---------
References:
Arendt, H. (2006). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Penguin Classics.
Solomon Asch Conformity Line Experiment Study. (2023, October 24). https://www.simplypsychology.org/asch-conformity.html
Franzen, A., & Mader, S. (2023). The power of social influence: A replication and extension of the Asch experiment. PLOS ONE, 18(11), e0294325. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0294325
Crutchfield, R. S. (1955). Conformity and character. American Psychologist, 10(5), 191–198. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0040237
Kegan, R. (1983). The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development (Reprint edition). Harvard University Press.
Kegan, R. (1998). In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life (Reprint edition). Harvard University Press.
Wilber, K. (2001). Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution, Second Edition (2nd Rev ed. edition). Shambhala.
Leary, M. (1996) Self-Presentation: Impression management and interpersonal behaviour. Retrieved July 24, 2024, from https://www.amazon.ca/Self-presentation-Impression-Management-Interpersonal-Behavior-ebook/dp/B07WWK73B1/
Amsel, E. (n.d.). Hypothetical thinking in adolescence:
Cook-Greuter, S. (2021). Ego Development: A Full-Spectrum Theory Of Vertical Growth And Meaning Making.
Hello everyone, I made a video trying to articulate my current understanding of gender so as to better point to something like a positive masculinity. It draws from queer theory, metamodern theory, integral theory, and complexity science. I've been watching Leo's videos since 2015, so I really value the community he's created. I would love to get everyone here's perspective on it. There are a few criticism I would already lay against it: Equivocating between gender and sex. I was trying to point to a superordinate category that contained either but didn't really explain this well enough. Not adequately differentiating between social construction and objective reality. As I said, I'm inspired by Dr. Jason Storms metamodern theory and their concept of metarealism, as well as Leo's Idealistic focus on reality as hallucination and Integral Theory's distinction between interiority and exteriority, but again, I didn't make this clear enough in the video itself. I also didn't spend enough time on holarchies and complex systems within each holonic level, and each quadrant. I think there is only so much I can cover in one video before it becomes an entire articulation of a philosophical system, but some things I need to work on for sure. Let me know what you think. Thank you so much!