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Have you ever felt uncomfortable eating with your hands when your colleagues are using knives and forks to cut their steak in a fancy manner? Or have you ever felt the need to remove your hijab when surrounded by a group of pretty girls showing their hair and makeup, adding a charm to their personality? It is not necessary that you feel inferior when eating with your hands, or that you don’t look pretty with the hijab. It is the need to fit in, the tendency to follow the crowd that makes us want to mimic the behavior of those around us. It’s called conformity.
It refers to our tendency to follow the crowd—that is, to conform (often unthinkingly) to authority or to group standards of conduct and belief. The desire to belong, to be part of the in-group, can be among the most powerful of human motivations.
Conformity may be useful in some circumstances. For example, if you are a tourist in a new country and don’t understand how to behave, you might follow other tourists or the locals’ behavior. But if you don’t have the ability to think critically and lack a sense of uniqueness and self-awareness, you might give up your own values and beliefs just to fit in, and the group can become an authority controlling your behavior.
Here is an experiment that explains the danger of conformity very well.
In Milgram’s experiment, subjects were asked to administer a series of increasingly severe electrical shocks to people whom the subjects could hear but couldn’t see. (In fact, no actual shocks were given; the “victims” were confederates who only pretended to be in pain.) Subjects were told that they were participating in a study of the effects of punishment on learning. Their task was to act as “teachers” who inflicted progressively more painful shocks on “learners” whenever the latter failed to answer a question correctly.
The severity of the shocks was controlled by a series of thirty switches, ranging in 15-volt intervals from 15 volts (“Slight Shock”) to 450 volts (“Danger: Severe Shock”). The purpose of the study was to determine how far ordinary people would go in inflicting pain on strangers simply because they were asked to do so by someone perceived as “an authority.”
The results were, well, shocking. More than 85 percent of the subjects continued to administer shocks beyond the 300-volt mark, long after the point at which they could hear the victims crying out or pounding on the walls in pain. After the 330-volt mark, the screaming stopped, and for all the subjects knew, the victims were either unconscious or dead. Despite that, nearly two-thirds (65 percent) of the subjects continued to administer shocks, as instructed, until they reached the maximum of 450 volts.
Now that it is clear that conformity can have a very dangerous impact if not channeled correctly, the question becomes: how do we navigate conformity to avoid its negative consequences?
The answer lies in critical thinking. Don’t hesitate to think outside the box and challenge the status quo when necessary. Be an independent thinker and celebrate your uniqueness. Be aware of your values and beliefs, and remember that it is okay to be different in group settings.
