The Modern Problems with Conformity

We are social animals, and conformity is part of our social adaptation. We imitate others. This imitation is not just superficial. It is deep. We imitate the structure of knowledge in other brains. For example, you learned language by absorbing knowledge from other people. That knowledge is subconscious. You use it every time you interpret or generate language, but you have no conscious access to it. You absorbed it subconsciously, and you apply it subconsciously.

Conformity has important functions. It speeds up knowledge acquisition. Rather than having to learn everything for yourself, you can acquire knowledge from other people. This creates culture: the accumulated knowledge of many people, past and present. Conformity is also necessary for society. Communication and cooperation depend on common knowledge, such as language and norms of behavior. If everyone went their own way intellectually, there could be no society.

Conformity also has some drawbacks. It can perpetuate knowledge that has ceased to be functional. It creates the potential for social delusions, such as crowd manias. It allows people to be controlled by propaganda. It also requires sacrificing some of your autonomy to other people, and to memes.

In the past, conformity was a good heuristic. Common memes were probably adaptive. If a meme was harmful to its hosts, they would not prosper. So, if you imitated the successful people in your community, you would likely be successful too. People lived in small societies, and they lived close to nature. Their memes were regularly tested by reality, and by each other. False beliefs could arise, such as religion, but such beliefs were tested for their adaptiveness. It was hard for a maladaptive meme to spread.

Today, those conditions no longer exist.

Conformity is unreliable if any of the following are true:

• Most people are crazy.

• You can choose your social circle.

• You are exposed to artificial people.

All three of these conditions exist in the modern world, making conformity an unreliable heuristic.

In the modern world, most people are crazy.

Obviously, conformity is a bad heuristic if most people are crazy, because it will make you crazy too. To caution against conformity, people often say “If everyone jumped off a bridge, would you?”. (Ironically, they are imitating others when they say that.) But in most cases, if everyone is jumping off a bridge, it is probably the right thing to do. However, if people are jumping off the bridge because they are crazy, then it would be a mistake to imitate them. In that situation, your own judgment could be better than the collective judgment of everyone else. There are times when it is best to think for yourself.

In the modern world, most people are crazy. They are not clinically insane, but their behavior is maladaptive. Our brains are not adapted to the environment of modern civilization. So, our instincts generate systematic errors. “Common sense” doesn’t work. (See Reproduction | Masturbation.) Also, parasitic memes, such as crowd manias, are very common now, due to how information spreads through modern technology.

So, imitating others is no longer an adaptive strategy. To be a successful organism in the modern world, you must act differently from other people.

In the modern world, you can choose your social circle.

In the past, people were tied to a community, such as a band or a village. That community included people of both sexes, different ages, and different personality types. It was a representative sample of humanity (for a given region). The common knowledge of that community was thus selected to work for people in general (in that region). It was not selected to appeal to a particular subset of people, such as ugly women or celibate men. It would have included myths, but those myths would have been unifying for the community, not divisive.

For example, divisive ideologies such as feminism and MGTOW could not exist within such a community, because most people would reject them.

Today, that is no longer the case. Instead of conforming to a fixed community, people can seek out a group to “conform” to. In doing so, they are not really conforming. They are seeking social validation for their quirks. Although we live in huge societies of millions, we can sort ourselves into little groups with different subcultures. Instead of conformity reducing deviations from normality and functionality, it can amplify deviations through social validation. People organize around their deviations, and then provide each other with validation of those deviations. Conformity becomes a vicious circle that amplifies deviations from the norm. Instead of uniting us, it divides us.

Conformity only works (as a heuristic) when you are forced to conform to an actual human community. It doesn’t work if you choose the people you conform to.

In the modern world, you are exposed to artificial people.

Television and the internet expose us to simulations of other human beings. The data of these simulations is processed in essentially the same way as data from real human beings. We conform to the simulated society and culture that we experience through screens. Because the simulation is not real, the knowledge acquired from it does not reflect reality. It is fake knowledge induced from artificial data.

Advertising is largely based on conformity. Ads show us simulations of other people using a product, and then we imitate those people. The imitation is at a deep level. It is not that you will run out and buy a Coke if you see someone drinking a Coke on TV. Instead, you will learn subconsciously that Coke is good. Later, when you are thirsty, you will consider buying a Coke. You will not be aware of how this desire was generated, any more than you are aware of how you interpret and generate speech.

We are also affected by entertainment. We naturally conform to the characters in TV shows and movies, and to social media influencers. This is another source of fake knowledge. For example, people have been exposed to many “love stories” in TV shows and movies. These stories do not reflect reality. What works in real life does not make a good script, and vice versa. People develop false expectations about romance, which can prevent them from developing real relationships.

Cultural norms can be shifted by entertainment. Suppose that the characters in TV shows and movies are slightly more left-wing than average. The audience will internally conform to those attitudes, shifting the average for real people. This is one reason for the “slippery slope”. Arguably, many recent shifts in attitudes were caused by this process.

Conformity is only a good heuristic if you are conforming to real people who live in similar circumstances.

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We still need to conform. We need a common language and common norms of behavior. But there is a greater need for individual rationality in the modern world. Our ancestors could rely on the collective wisdom of the community. We can’t.