Conformity and the Reader

Hey dear reader! A question… Do you have someone in your life that gets those impossible "the table is red" kind of moods when the table is clearly blue? That one person who fumes away as they insist on their stance that could easily be disproven by common sense or empirical evidence?

I think everyone must have one of these acquaintances lying around somewhere. And what do you do when such individuals begin to huff and puff? Do you fight until you reach that “Pyrrhus victory”, or do you fold? Or is it a more insidious influence that affects one ever so subtly and you come to find yourself conforming to another person’s influence only to sit back and gasp as you realize what you’d just allowed to happen?

But wait, the plot thickens! Are you an unwilling victim of social pressure put on by more than one individual? Let’s consider the well-known Asch conformity experiment. Only one person in the experiment is the test subject but the whole thing is set up so that several people are seated around a table. The experimenter then proceeds to show a series of cards with three lines of varying sizes on them and the participants are meant to match one of the three lines to the identical line on another card at the table. In all cases, one line is clearly the longest, for example, or the thickest, and can easily be matched to its doppelganger on another card and it doesn’t leave much to the imagination. Yet, every few rounds, the covert faux-participants would suddenly unanimously choose a card that was wrong, with a line that clearly didn’t match.

Would you have conformed, oh Reader? Well, about 1/3 of the test subjects did conform to the peer pressure generated. What does this tell us about conformity? Well, we shan’t chime in to the many criticisms this experiment already received but rather use it to make a point: sometimes, when everyone insists that the table is red, quite a few people will say (if not truly think): “perhaps the table is a rather warm shade of blue…”

And what does it matter if you do conform to some trivial matters, as you entertain the one pushy person or water your peers’ tribal mentality? Well, perhaps you can tell me, as you try to get that bad taste out of your throat while you scrutinize the color of that table you just metaphorically sat at… Conform to that demand, I dare you!

Image sources: 1, 2.