Conformity as a religion

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Well ... what if there's a gene or gene complex for a churlish neurology? Wouldn't it be pretty effective at competing against genomes that lack it? It wouldn't offer any objective advantage to the one holding it, just a disadvantage to the one who didn't - but that's a relative advantage for the one who holds it.



Or that. A lot of this stuff can be explained by people using flawed heuristics in order to save on mental resources.



Good question.

As I understand it, active, conscious decision-making is rare. Most of the time, we act; occasionnally, we act, then justify it after the fact as a decision.

Saying it is "chemical/neurological" may be misleading. All behaviours are necessarily neurological, in the end.


Yes, but skip the pejorative language. Everyone cuts mental corners. It is completely necessary. It is not that some people are dumb, it is that we live in a complicated world, which provides a lot of raw data. All this data is neatly compressed in a manner that is almost always adequate and allows us to go on with our lives. There objectively isn't enough time to correctly analyze every single bit of information.

Maybe that's my problem - I act too little, decide too much.



In the moment that is true. This is the essence of heuristics. False heuristics lead to some very bad outcomes at times, and inform many prejudices and similar phenomena. It's understandable that corners are cut in the moment. What I do not understand is that some do not question or revise the script they are using, they never reflect on it or subject it to analysis. There is time to do this, through reflection and examination, perhaps not in the moment but over longer periods of time there are infinite opportunities to do this. So time is not the issue.

So do I. However, I get the feeling that users of this forum are not a representative sample on this...


There are many issues on which one could change one's attitude. Why should a particular issue be chosen over many others? A thorough, introspective and critical evalution of the validity of one's attitude on a precise subject is already a heavy investment, let alone critical thinking on everything.

I can say, myself, that I am systematically biased in favour of democracy (it's more complicated than that, though), protection of the environment (especially against global warming), cities and education, and against cars and smoking. I never reflect deeply on any these fundamental principles. Why on Earth would I want to look for reasons for cars to be a good things when I truly see them as dangerous oil-burning killing machines? Why should I apprehend critically the basis of avoiding greenhouse gases when I am so obviously in the right? I have much better things to put my mind to. Yet, on all these issues on which, I think you will agree, my position is probably not unreasonnable, I can't say I am very critical on the core elements of my position. I haven't tried to falsify my beliefs; on the contrary, I look for more and more reasons not to like smoking and why cities are so much better than backwards rural area.

Why should I expect my racist colleague to magically understand how her behaviour is discriminatory and unfair? All that can be done is to educate the next generation less badly than the previous one, and hope it will partially negate her influence with other, less harmful dogmas. (Here, you notice that I show bias in favour of education, and that it involves an outside, subjective and fallible assessment of which kind of dogma is better.)

Last edited by enrico_dandolo on 06 Jul 2012, 1:23 am, edited 1 time in total.

Funny thing I was just thinking. Religion of course has done harm. And if Conformity became a religion. It would most likley do the same thing cool huh

I regard every idea as a placeholder until something better comes along. Or at least I try to. Including all the ones you named. If a better idea comes along, why on Earth would I consciously seek to resist it?

Again, that's if it isn't already in so many ways.

It is not a question of resistance, it is a question of exposition. If, for example, someone is racist, they will constantly see evidence proving that they are right to be racist, because they won't actively (i.e. consciously) try to correct the inherent bias. Therefore, racist stereotype will automatically reinforce themselves.

I have read that the reason conformity is ubiquitous through history and all over the world is because it is the way of signaling group membership, including membership in sub-groups within the larger group. People try to figure out which group others are a member of based on image and actions (including speech patterns). Having the rules change frequently and sometimes inexplicably is a tool to spot infiltrators from a rival group, who will not be aware of the most recent changes. (It must be very hard to be an undercover cop, who will be killed if they fail to be 100% accurate and up-to-date.)

The most dangerous place to be is on the margins with no group affiliation at all. If you have no group affiliation, it means that nobody has "got your back" and this is dangerous. The danger of those margins is a common theme on the WP bullying threads. It's not a place people want to be, thus the ubiquitous conformity.

There is one group whose rule is "no rules". That is the Artist/Eccentric group. A defining feature of this group is that they are well aware of which social norms they are not conforming to and have made a conscious "no-conformity" decision. When people interact with you and you don't seem to abide with any known norms of any known group, they will poke at you to see if you belong in the Artist/Eccentric group. If you fit, then all is well- or not, depending on how they feel about members of that group. I suppose that membership in that group (assumed by others or accepted by "fellow" artists and eccentrics) will depend on how well you frame your deviation from the social norm.

But anyway, the reason people don't push back against this ubiquitous conformity is because most people want to be a member of a group for loneliness and also for safety reasons. WP is a group and it is sprinkled with posts of delirious happiness by people who went decades on the margins and are delighted to find that they actually have a group membership. And WP, like all groups, has rules. As I said above, one of the functions of rules is to spot imposters who are infilterating the group with bad intent. You can see this in action with troll accusations which are sometimes accurate. This "spot a troll" mechanism happens in every group which is why people can be so fussy about wearing just the right thing.

edited to addL: beliefs are also part of group membership signaling (and conformity to those beliefs is the bulk of this thread's discussion so I should have put it in the body of the post but don't feel like re-writing the whole thing.) When you believe something wildly different from the majority of those you are interacting with, you will be presumed to belong to whichever group is known to also believe that. If you believe something that no other group believes, you will be shoved to the margins. Believing something anathema to the group while retaining group membership is a delicate dance. You can see that in action on WP when somebody says something "outrageous" and then gets troll accusations. They must then expend several posts explaining why this belief does not make them a troll. Sometimes, it turns out that they really are a troll and are banned. This mechanism happens in all groups, which is why people get all squinty eyed when you say something they find odd or horribly wrong.

Confucianism.

Discussed.

There is a tendency in most people (though not all) to "join the club".

ruveyn