Us and Them: The Blog

What's So Bad About Conformity?

Everything, was the idea I was raised on. The individual who stands against the crowd must be a hero. The sinister pressure of the herd leads only to evil.

I think this research was based on assumptions conditioned by the experience of World War II and the Cold War. Psychologists focussed on the conformity that made millions give in to totalitarian regimes -- rather than the non-conformity of a Hitler, a Stalin or a Mao, which told each that he alone would remake the world. (After all, what better example of ``think different'' could there be than Mao, who cursed his father every day of his life and burned the Confucian classics?)

Now, with more distance, psychologists have new takes on some of the classic parables of their field. Among these: the experiments by Sherif and Asch in which people change their minds about something in response to group pressure; the Milgram studies on obedience to authority; and the Kitty Genovese case (in which 38 people supposedly witnessed a murder and did nothing -- a deeply shocking story whose one flaw is that it is not true).

Outside of psychology, there are other signs of change around the idea of ``conformity'' as simple and necessarily bad. Dan Ariely's new book, Predictably Irrational, which I recently reviewed here, details how ``rational economic man'' has been overthrown as a model for how people make decisions. In place of a model that says individuals tally up information and calculate their strategies, behavioral economics recognizes the reality that in decision making we're usually responding to how we feel about our relationships to other people. Moreover, as Ariely says, the discipline recognizes that this valuing of social relationships is not a bad thing.

And then there's the recent work of the sociologist Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog of Oxford, trying to account for an interesting fact about religious terrorists: A disproportionate number of them are engineers. For example, of the 25 9/11 hijackers, 8 were trained in engineering. Gambetta and Hertog propose that there is an ``engineering mindset,'' part of which involves a predilection for thinking that there are correct, perfect solutions to problems -- solutions which don't admit, I think, of compromise with others' feelings or conventions.

I'm still trying to decide what I think about this idea -- the paper is here as a pdf. But I do think the paper is another sign that the old concept of ``conformity'' is being rebuilt.

There was, until lately, a moralistic and monolithic notion of ``conformity'' as a kind of illness or pollution undermining the gloriously free-thinking individual. That's being replaced by a more supple model of ``conformist'' behavior emerging and subsiding as people go about their lives, balancing their respect for others, and for human relationships, against their own subjective experiences and impulses.

I describe this change in this piece in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine.

Richard Wagner and the 2008 Election

A post over at TPM discusses the two-tier strategy that Republicans use against Democrats in Presidential elections. One tier is a supposedly respectful discussion of differences on the issues. The other is the stirring up of negative emotions by coded messages.

In my book I discuss a number of rhetorical tricks for making a target feel like one of ``Them,'' not one of ``Us.'' These tactics recur in many times and places because they fit the innate biases of the mind. And the TPM post made me realize that we'll be seeing a lot of examples during the campaign. So from now on I'll be pointing them out when I see them, coming from either party.

In discussing all this, TPM's Josh Marshall proposes an operatic metaphor. Rational discussion of public policy, he says, is like the libretto. The coded imagery that flavors a campaign -- the stress on Barack Obama's middle name, the blind quote from a Pentagon official saying Obama's inauguration will be a signal to Islamist terrorists of ``we lose, they win'' -- that stuff, in contrast, is the music.

Marshall's is a nice image, which I think works more broadly as a way to think about the way real people make real decisions. In that process, the explicit, measurable, ``objective'' facts are only part of a mental experience that is also defined by the hidden and subjective parts of the mind. The words of an opera's printed libretto are the same to any reader; but the experience of a performance is highly individual and subjective. Music affects the mind because it follows rules, too, but they are not the rules of logic. They're different.

As it happens, I recently reviewed Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational, whose main point could be expressed by this book-versus-music metaphor. We like to imagine (and our theories of economics and democracy depend on this) that people are governed by their rational cognition. But, in the same way that the experience of opera is not the reading of a libretto, the experience of making a decision is not all about the aspects of if that can be explicitly described and reproduced reliably outside their personal context.

By the way, Marshall's example was based on Richard Wagner's operas, which, he later added, were not the best possible example, because

``Wagner is one of the few major composers -- I'm actually not sure there are any others -- to write his own librettos [...]''

There were others -- Berlioz, Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky and Richard Strauss among them. But I don't think the metaphor requires that the words and music come from separate creators. In fact, it makes more sense to me as an image for one person's divided mind. So Wagner works here.

Of course, he also works for another reason. The relationship between his music and his poetry is a good example for the argument that parts of the mind are neither neatly separated nor neatly related. Wagner's music made his ghastly ideas more attractive; his ghastly ideas informed his music. For example, Theodore Adorno pointed out long ago that detestable characters in Wagner operas (Mime, Beckmesser) were written to sound Jewish.

The mind is modular and not coherent in its operations, but this does not mean, I think, that we should think of each module as independent of the others. Everything in the mind affects everything else, and no part of the process explains the others.

A madman with an armload of gems . . .

I love this image, from a reader who is, I gather, a conservative Christian and who is not taken with Us and Them, my book.

He also says I'm smug. Ouch. I much prefer to be called a jewel-dropping lunatic.

Flexibility

Fascinating report in the papers today about how much of the American population has changed religious affiliation. Some 28 percent of adults say they have changed their religious affiliation -- and that counts only serious switches, like Orthodox Christian-to-Catholic, not intramural stuff like Lutheran-to-Methodist.

On the one hand, it's a reminder that religious identity, like any other, can be altered or shed -- incredible as that may seem to people who have not known a society in which religion was not the guideline for distributing opportunity, safety and trust. Identity that seems ineluctable in one place is escapable in another.

On the other hand, the only reason that the news is of interest is precisely because religion still matters so much to Americans. It suggests a curious effect of religious liberation on a history of religious fervent: We now live in a country where, it seems, people feel free to give any answer they please to the religious question -- but where there still is a widespread consensus that the question must be answered.

Blood Sports

Curious evidence about the link between sports and violence. Daniel I. Rees of the University of Colorado found that assaults and other mayhem increase after college football games, which is not super-surprising. The surprising part is that the amount of the increase in violence depends the outcome of the game. Assaults and vandalism go up the most, Rees found, after an upset -- and it didn't matter whether, for the home team, that upset was a surprise loss or a surprise win. Upsets of either type were followed by a spike in assaults. College sports have all sorts of bad effects on society, which the sports-loving elite refuses to count (for instance, college football brings revenue to the schools, which is tabulated to the last dime, but, as Rees points out, who offsets those figures by the costs of the crime the games impose on the surrounding areas?). But at least this time, it's an interestingly bad effect.

Maybe Hitchens is right . . .

Maybe religion does ruin everything. Certainly more people the world over in endangered by religious belief than by its opponents, a point this sad story illustrates.

Poetic and Scientific Justice . . .

. . . about the genome of James Watson.

Heroes at the boundary

Every once in a while the news cycle heaves up an example of an individual who ignores prevailing categories for people, and in the face of official power, acts in favor of a kinder and more difficult concept of who belongs to ``us,'' rather than ``them.'' I wish I had remembered to post something on Vasily Arkhipov day, October 27th. That was the date in 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when Arkhipov refused to agree with two other officers on his Soviet submarine, who wanted to launch a nuclear-armed torpedo at U.S. warships. By refusing to think of his duty in terms of the Soviet Navy or the U.S.S.R, he may well have saved humanity from nuclear war.

Let me not miss my chance again. Here's the story of Manuel Jesus Cordova Soberanes, who'd snuck across the U.S.-Mexico border a little before Thanksgiving, looking for work. On Thanksgiving day in the desert he came across an injured 9-year-old boy, who'd been in a traffic accident (in which his mother had been killed). Soberanes gave the boy, Christopher Buchleitner, food and his own sweater, and stayed with the child throughout the night. That guaranteed that he would be deported, but those were not the terms in which he was classifying his experience that night. He himself is a parent, he said.

This essay by Eric Haas puts the story in the context. Thanks to Dan Kowalski, editor of Bender's Immigration Bulletin, for the tip.

Our Far-Flung Correspondent

A bit of ornithological writing by yours truly appears in The New Yorker, issue of Nov. 5. You can read it online here.

Sports are to good character as fish are to elevator repair

There is race, religion, nation, culture, ideology -- all of these categories can serve as the basis for unreasoning hatred and violence toward the ``wrong'' people. Organized sports, on the other hand, are supposed to be good for us all, promoting good character in individuals and peaceful comity in society. It's costly nonsense. Sports passions can have the same hateful effect as those of nation, religion or faction. That was true long ago. And in living memory. And the day before yesterday.