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.