370
The Emperor's New Clothes
The king hired two weavers to make him a new suit. The weavers claim that they will create the most beautiful clothes in the world. In truth, however, the two are con artists, and they trick the king by pretending that they are using a magical fabric invisible to fools. All the courtiers invited to view the weavers' work pretend to see the clothes, terrified of looking like fools unfit for their roles.
While doing so, they each want to know whether someone around them is "faking" their own cleverness.
No one feels they can challenge the weavers' truthfulness. One after another, the influential figures in the awkward situation collapse, all reinforcing the "validity" of the fabric. Soon afterward, the weavers report that the clothes are finished and pretend to dress the king. The king parades naked in front of the people.
The villagers, not wanting to look stupid, uncomfortably go along with the pretense. Then, in the crowd, a child blurts out that the king is wearing nothing — and others begin to follow and shout the same thing.
"The Emperor's New Clothes" is a story that questions self-deception, conformity, and obedience to authority. Like every good fairy tale, this one tries to teach a lesson about human behavior. Learning to speak up first, like that child did, is a good habit; it helps build the psychological resilience to refuse meaningless conformity.
The weavers exposed "how the system works" by playing not with a material fabric but with the fabric of social relationships and truth.
In particular, they exploited human psychology by leveraging the shame of looking inadequate to others, and the fear of loss and exclusion.
How different the story would have been if the crowd had not stayed silent.
It would clearly have been shorter, and would not have captured human psychology so well. Most people want to think that they are simply not going along with the crowd. But this is the typical face of every person. In Battle for the Mind, William Sargant pointed out the following.
When a person simply accepts most of the social standards and patterns of behavior, they are considered "normal" in the community. In fact, this means they are highly suggestible and have been persuaded to follow the majority opinion in most ordinary or special situations. Those who hold minority opinions are called "madmen" — or at least "eccentrics" — for life, even if it is later proven that they were right.
Psychologist Philip Zimbardo, who ran the notorious Stanford Prison Experiment, agreed: "To become a hero, you must learn to be a deviant — because you must always stand against group conformity."
372
Group Addiction
Nudge theory presupposes conformity. Lawyer and behavioral economist Cass Sunstein, in his book Conformity: The Power of Social Influence, offered two explanations for this human tendency. First, informational influence happens when people adjust their behavior in the "correct" direction. We often place our hopes in someone we believe knows more than we do. Second, normative influence stems from the desire to please someone and avoid being punished by them. Combine these two principles and you can explain the silence of the courtiers and of the crowd.
Sunstein says this attitude is a signal of trying to conform to an information "cascade." When an information cascade occurs, people stop relying on their own personal information or opinions and instead rely on the signals others are sending. Failing to follow the "norm" can lead to shame and potentially being abandoned. Essentially, people want to be right and to be loved by others.
In Solomon Asch's famous conformity experiments in the 1950s, the influence of group pressure on opinion was revealed.* These experiments showed how much an individual's opinion is influenced by the group's. Participants were shown one line, then asked to choose, among three lines of different lengths, which one matched the original. Asch found that people would willingly ignore reality and submit a wrong answer in order to conform to the opinions of others in the group (in the experiment, the actors had been instructed to deliberately give the wrong answer).
The drive to follow group opinion is innate, and is also observed in animals. Animals assume that if other members of the herd are doing something, that behavior is safe and appropriate. For example, the Larsen trap uses a cage that birds, once they enter, cannot escape from. Normally, birds would be naturally suspicious. But this trap has a special compartment where it provides food and water to a kind of "traitor" bird. Wild birds, seeing their fellow safely inside, head toward their doom.
Joy Owen, a bird breeder at East Sussex Smallholders, explained: "Birds like chickens, ducks, and turkeys want to lay their eggs where other birds are laying. They assume that the other birds who got there first must have decided it's a safe and good place. So all of them follow. We humans are no different — we want to live in a school district that received high grades on a school evaluation."
Asch found that conformity increases the more people are present, the harder the task is, and the higher the perceived status of the other group members.5 Conversely, conformity decreases when people can answer privately. This is exactly why the courtiers in front of the king, and the villagers in front of those of "higher status" than themselves, were ashamed to look stupid. To break through the overwhelming conformity of a large crowd, you need the innocence of a young boy.
Crowds aren't all bad. When you feel identified with a crowd, the tendency to conform makes you feel safe. You can make trustworthy decisions, and in a physical sense you can literally be safer. We don't eat berries in the bush that other people are avoiding. Real crowds, contrary to assumption, can actually be safe. One study has argued that "the self-organization of crowds prevents disasters."
We are social animals who depend on cooperation and on groups. Dr. Libby Nugent, a clinical psychologist and group-work practitioner,
explained: "From an evolutionary development standpoint, groups existed before individuals. We need groups. When we talk about the hierarchy of needs, our most basic need is precisely belonging. We sacrifice everything in order to belong somewhere."
Conformity arises for sound evolutionary reasons. Yet great thinkers, research, and many books explain the dangers of crowds and conformity. In Brave New World Revisited, Aldous Huxley said that humans get lost in the crowd because we are not built to be automaton-like machines, and that if we were to become automatons, our mental health and freedom would be in danger.
(Hitler) gathered tens of thousands of people in giant halls and stadiums in order to make them more mass-like, homogeneous, and sub-human.
There the individual could lose his identity, even his basic humanity, and merge with the crowd. ... They became sensitive to stimuli, and, having lost all sense of personal or collective responsibility, they would suddenly fall into rage, ecstasy, or panic. In short, the man in the crowd behaves as if he had swallowed a large dose of a powerful, addictive substance. He is the victim of what I call "herd-poisoning."
Carl Jung, another great thinker of the same era, reached a similar conclusion. Jung had lived through the destructive group movements of the World Wars and the Cold War — mass movements, mass hysteria, and what he called "psychic epidemics." In his book The Undiscovered Self, Jung advises on how to minimize the dangers to the individual and to society.6 The most important thing one can do to resist mass crowds and mass movements is to grant oneself individuality. "Resistance to organized masses is possible only by someone whose individuality is as well-organized as the masses themselves." Jung believed one could give oneself individuality through meaningful values, work, community, faith, and religion. That person is then more likely to be the first to speak up.
Crowds can rage, surge, and turn violent — but other dangers exist within groups like professional communities, neighborhoods, or religious organizations. In the age of social media, this becomes even more important. Groups form by interest and coordinate through pages, followings, hashtags, the emojis displayed in bios as a kind of new standard, and so on, but in reality the people are likely to be physically far apart. Nugent says,
"We live in a world that depends increasingly on the psychology of groups and large groups, while knowing almost nothing about it. We have the World Wide Web and social media but don't know what to do with them. We have invented the 'atomic bomb of group psychology' and are playing with it like a toy."
People hold fixed prejudices about the in-group they belong to. For instance, they tend to feel greater empathic pain when they see their own race suffering (via mirror neurons).7 One study found that Black Americans were more likely to agree with the statement "African Americans need to stop making excuses and rely on themselves more to get ahead in society" when it was said by a Black politician rather than a White one.10 Among European countries watching the Eurovision Song Contest, people tend to vote for neighbors who are geographically or politically close.
"Us vs. them" is a powerful mechanism that manipulators frequently exploit. In a broader sense, so is "black-and-white thinking." When people become too attached to an identity or an idea, it can work against them. Research shows that people with a high "need for cognitive closure" are, in some ways, easier to persuade.11 Those who are more comfortable saying "I'm not sure" and remaining in ambiguity are less likely to be taken in by manipulators promoting silver bullets and cure-alls. Garrett, who teaches people how to leave cult groups, said the following.
Cults exploit black-and-white thinking like "right and wrong." It is a powerful control mechanism that operates in subtle ways. Pitting one's birth family against the cult group is a classic case of polarization. In my case, it happened very slowly.
I came to genuinely believe that our group was a far more important family — to the point where I didn't even attend my brother's funeral. The funeral was scheduled for the same weekend as a retreat I had already committed to. To justify staying with my cult family instead of going to the funeral, I constructed an entirely different reality.
Group thinking can hinder independent thought. Gustave Le Bon's crowd-psychology theory, presented in The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, was one of the earliest and most influential. He believed that an individual could lose their sense of self within a group, but at the same time gain anonymity as part of the group and become more powerful. When an individual joins a group, thoughts and feelings become contagious. Think of individual fish moving as a school. Recent theorists have criticized Le Bon's conceptualization of crowds as "lacking in nuance," but it is clear that bad ideas can take hold of a group. Our powerful tendency toward conformity is supported by countless scientific experiments, and manipulators ruthlessly exploit it.
We tend to think that even if we came up with an idea ourselves, we would not be carried away by it. In reality, we often are. As Carl Jung famously said, "Man does not make his ideas; ideas make the man."12 This connects to our daily lives. We know moments where thoughts like "that person is out of their mind today" or "I don't know what's happening to me" take hold of us. Jung's words can also refer to psychic epidemics or mass hysteria — phenomena that can take over people's minds, from small social groups to entire nations.
There are many historical cases where the group's view was wrong, and a lonely voice — like that of "the boy who spoke up" — turned out to be right. Galileo, the famous 16th- and 17th-century physicist and thinker, defended Copernicus's heliocentric theory, which correctly grasped that the sun does not orbit the earth but the opposite. Yet the Pope and the priests of the Catholic Church (the "higher-status" officials within the "crowd") refused to accept his highly controversial theory. Galileo was declared a heretic and a fool, and was sentenced to lifetime house arrest. In this classic case, Galileo was right and the consensus opinion was wrong.
Sunstein says that conformity can be either good or bad, depending on the outcome. If the political goal achieved is desirable, then conformity caused by social pressure or misinformation may be acceptable. But can the ends really justify the means? Do you think other people will know which political views are desirable for you?
Today we see continuous, influential, and well-choreographed conformity-like movements moving in harmony — a real-world example of an idea that has captured people's minds. Let's look at one modern example of how conformity evolves: human-induced climate change.
