Two Perspectives of Conformity

Any society in human history has so far relied on one strategy for its survival more than any other. This strategy consists of an alliance between ourselves and others and is achieved by the means of conformity. I define conformity as ‘being in accordance with the rules, values, and behavior patterns of a group.’ Historically, the drive to conform has played a crucial role when a group’s struggle for survival was harsh and being an outcast of a tribe meant certain death. Conformity has worked well in the past because there was relatively little change in the condition of life over a period of generations. As a result, it could safely be assumed that the rules and traditions that worked well in the past would continue to work well in the future. However, as times have changed the usefulness and reliability of conformity has declined and in modern societies it has often been perceived as a problem rather than a virtue.

I will present conformity as a social problem in terms of the social pathology and social disorganization perspective. For the first perspective, I will consider the problem to emerge as a result of a previously nonexistent freedom that characterizes contemporary democratic societies. From this freedom emerged the new ideal of the creative and rationally thinking individual which so far has not been realized due to the pattern of conformity we observe around us today. The second perspective will consider society as a whole and see the problem in a lack of coordination between the scientific and social side of our society.

The social pathology perspective often considers all to be well when society is functioning smoothly and individuals conform to accepted ideals. This seems to imply that conformity is a healthy aspect of society. Yet this does not need to be the case. The first error here lies in the assumption that conformity is a prerequisite for a healthy society since without it people could not pursue ideals. Now, two people may pursue the same ideal because they fear that not doing so would jeopardize their acceptance in the community. In this case, they are conforming to an ideal. On the other hand, they could have decided to pursue the same ideals as free thinking individuals and independently of one another. Since they made no effort to ‘fit in’, they certainly did not conform. Another error in thinking that the social pathology perspective regards conformity as healthy is the assumption that the superficial harmony and lack of noticeable conflict achieved through conformity is equivalent to social health. But as I will show, some thinkers have come to regard conformity as particularly pathological because it tends to remain hidden or unnoticed.

To understand conformity it is necessary to point out that when people conform, they do so voluntarily and often feel they are following their own choices. Conformity is actually a subtle control mechanism analogous to direct authority (which forces people to act a certain way against their will). The striking difference between them is that direct authorities such as absolute monarchies or the use of severe methods of punishing and disciplining have been more readily recognized as a problem. This is one reason why such authority has declined over the past several hundred years while conformity hasn’t. Another reason is the sheer ineffectiveness of direct authority. As an illustration of this, consider Martin Buber’s thoughts on direct authority:

This tendency to defy authority strongly suggests that it should be unable to create stable social order. The break-down of the communist Soviet Union may be taken as further evidence that this should hold true. Psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, an avid advocate of the social pathology perspective, goes as far drawing the parallel between the growth of freedom in Western Democracies and the shift from an "overt" (or direct) to an "anonymous" authority. "The mechanism through which the anonymous authority operates is conformity [his emphasis]" (Fromm, 153). Conformity may thus be viewed as a fundamental basis upon which democratic social systems are built. Inasmuch as authority is "anonymous," it is difficult to rebel against or to perceive as a problem because people feel as if they are already following their free will. Conformity thus tends to be seen as unproblematic even though it is just another form of authority.

Conformity may be viewed as pathological in that an individual's sense of identity and self-worth become based on conformity rather than on an expression of the true self. As Fromm remarked: "[In Western Culture,] many substitutes for a truly individual sense of identity were sought for, and found. Nation, religion, class and occupation serve to furnish a sense of identity" (Fromm, 62). In addition, he recognizes identity as not "merely a philosophical problem,... [but a need that] stems from the very condition of human existence" (Fromm, 63). What this view implies is that conformity is not a new phenomenon, but one that was the norm at an earlier time in human history. Thus, the ideal of attaining individuality means that societies of the past have not been adequate in meeting human needs, and that today we must seek it in new ways.

A variation of this need of identity which has become prevalent especially in modern industrial societies is the drive to be 'part of the herd' or the need to fit in, as it were. As smaller communities and tribes grew more rare during the course of the industrial revolution, so did one's fixed place in the social structure. Today, each of our 'places in society' is largely undetermined at birth and we live in contact with a huge proportions of strangers. As Fromm wrote in 1956, the result is that "instead of a pre-individualistic clan identity, a new herd identity develops, in which the sense of identity rests on the sense of an unquestionable belonging to the crowd" (Fromm, 62). While conformity is, in this sense, a new phenomenon, this should not be stressed too heavily, since the drive to conform can be assumed to have been in existence even in pre-democratic societies. The difference seems to be that within a fixed social order, the rules are already predefined and people do not have much choice except to follow them.

The pathology of conformity also lies in an individual's lack of creativity and independent thought. Psychotherapist Clark Moustakas sees the problem in that "He [the conformist] moves toward falsehood, fakery, pretense. His values and convictions do not emerge from real experience" (Moustakas, 41). What Moustakas describes is a tendency to copy others and accept this unquestioningly. As conformity in this sense is quite widespread, it should not be hard for any of us to come up with numerous examples from our own experience. I once attended a boarding school in West-Germany where a large proportion of the students smoked. Most of them would openly admit to me that although they did not personally like it, they did it 'to be social.' As another example, I've seen the following experiment repeated countless times in nearly every classroom I've been in: The teacher asks the class a question which is to be answered by a raise of hands. Nearly always, it takes a few students to take the initiative before the rest of the class joins in to raise their hands. Frequently, no one is willing to take the initiative, and thus no one raises their hand at all. In both examples I gave, the individual does not express how he truly feels and thinks in fear of deviating from those around him.

The Problem of Conformity--Social Disorganization Perspective

As another way of looking at the problem of conformity, I will make use of the social disorganization perspective. At first, this may seem completely unworkable since the perspective assumes that a social problem consists of a state of disorder resulting from a lack of consistent rules. Conformity would thus be an effective mechanism against social disorganization in that it helps society function smoothly and with fewer conflicts. This is indeed true if we think only of the short term. However, I will present conformity as an ineffective mechanism for guiding society in the long term; I will show that society, when regarded as one whole system, is characterized by a very poor coordination of scientific versus social innovation and change. In this sense, conformity is indeed the key component of a social disorganization that characterizes our world.

The key to understanding the state of disorganization our world finds itself in lies in recognizing the disparity between the scientific impulse to change and revolutionize and society's attempts to maintain the status quo and to conform. Since the industrial revolution, science has been and continues to be the ultimate impetus for nearly all the change our society is going through. Thus, the major shifts in the economy, globalization, the emergence of new businesses, the demise of old ones, and most new philosophical ideas are nearly all rooted in scientific progress. As a result, technological devices have continued to rapidly improve and innovate, while social institutions and structures have hardly changed.

To see how social institutions have failed to change, consider the rather ancient ritual in which a professor attempts to transmit knowledge to a group of students by standing in the front of a room and lecturing. The historical reasons for this arrangement are that before the arrival of the printing press copying down notes was the most effective means of transmitting information. Today, we hear professors, especially in the fields of mathematics and sciences, emphasize that 'one can only learn by doing,' and a few openly admit that their lecturing is a very ineffective means of teaching. Of course they continue to lecture because it is their job, but the truth cannot be altered that learning (especially in math and science) can be achieved much more efficiently and effectively in a self-paced environment using the textbook as a major source of knowledge. In fact, nuclear physicist Murray Gell-Mann has stated:

Gell-Mann is not alone in criticizing our educational system. Cognitive and Computer Scientist Roger Schank remarks, "What kids learn in high school and college is antilearning. By reading Dickens in ninth grade, I learned to hate Dickens...I don’t think there should be a curriculum." (Brockman, 172) Likewise, Albert Einstein said of universities of his day: "One had to cram all this stuff into one's mind for the examinations, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect on me that, after I passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year" (Hoffman, 31). Amazingly, schools have hardly changed since Einstein's time. But this lack of change is of course common to any large bureaucratic organization rather than just universities. Robert Sternberg and Todd Lubart emphasize this in their book Defying the Crowd: "People inside the system (not referring to a particular one) essentially pass up on the opportunity to do creative things because they can't imagine things being any other way" (Sternberg, 87).

The need for overcoming social conformity is becoming more and more apparent. And though I haven’t given examples, one could criticize equally the government and businesses as well as our schools. Sternberg and Lubart stress the need for more creativity quite succinctly:

One of the primary ways by which conformity is encouraged today is through the educational system. In Shifts in the Social Contract, sociologist Beth A. Rubin notes, "In kindergarten through high school, for example, an important emphasis in conventional education is on following rules and respecting authority" (82). In this way, any idea or behavior that is new or different will be punished for not conforming to the rules. In effect, the system reinforces an already existing inclination of students toward conformity by defining it as good and everything else as bad. Sternberg and Lubart have suggested the following reform for educational settings:

In a similar vein, Rubin asserts that "one of the things schools will have to do to further prepare future workers is to emphasize learning to learn rather than fact-based learning" (Rubin, 84). What these types of suggestions have in common is that they de-emphasize the classic teaching technique of following a fixed routine. Instead, they strive to give students more freedom within the system to enable them to develop creativity rather than conformity.

It seems plausible that in a business setting, similar reforms could be made to encourage creativity of workers. Other means of reeducation, however, seem less plausible. One might imagine making TV shows, advertisements, and movies that are thought to induce passivity and uncritical thinking illegal. Though it would be quick, banning them by law is probably not be the answer. Yet this does not mean that we should not focus on other means working toward this goal. After all, few people will argue that much of what the contemporary media offers teaches creative or critical thought in any degree.

Through a reform within the learning environments in all spheres of life, the social pathology perspective would attempt to teach individuals to defy conformity. This proposal assumes that such reform is both capable of being implemented on a large scale, and that relatively minor adjustments within a society will effect a clear and distinct improvement over today. The sheer magnitude of the problem of conformity as well as the failure of large organizations to make major changes within them until now seem to indicate that a few reform measures are unlikely to make a discernible difference in the world. It seems that much more radical measures than what was proposed in this section would be needed to produce a viable solution.

Instead of teaching people to think differently through specific educational efforts, the social disorganization perspective will focus on changing the social structure at large. To create truly enormous change, we might have to consider changing the entire economic system on which the US is based, as Fromm did in 1956:

This solution would be interesting to consider, provided it had a significant number of supporters. As it stands, most people (including myself) would agree that socialism is practically guaranteed not to emerge in the future, as more and more countries are shifting to capitalism to remain competitive within the global market. (There do exist other possible large-scale solutions, but I will avoid discussing them in this particular paper because of their speculative nature.)

First, I will comment on the viability of both the sociological perspectives and the solutions presented. Each perspective examined the problem from a distinctly different standpoint. The social pathology perspective required a moral ideal to define the problem while the social disorganization perspective relied on an esthetic judgment of how our society functions as a whole. In order to differentiate between the perspectives, I proposed solutions that addressed these particular assumptions. For the pathology perspective, I suggested educational reform to change our values or morals. For the disorganization perspective, I opted for a view of society as a whole and pointed to socialism because it is a well-known alternative to our society.

Both perspectives make claims that can be backed up with what is common knowledge. This makes the perspectives convincing to a certain point, but the degree to which individuals tend to conform or institutions fail to adapt to changing times remains somewhat fuzzy. Arriving at statistics regarding how much individuals conform would be practically impossible since there are no methods by which we can reliably analyze the motivations of behavior of a large group of people. Similarly, determining the precise degree to which institutions have not adapted or innovated is difficult because it requires speculation about how they might be different in ways that have no precedence. Judging the soundness of the solutions proposed is even more abstruse. Conformity is a problem that is not amenable to solutions that attempt to change one specific aspect of society, all other factors being equal. Changing the educational system is an attempt at this, but its implementation would result in the equivalent of trying to make students ‘conform to nonconformity’. This is because conformity is the fundamental mechanism by which institutions accomplish the pursuit of new goals. In the end, the only way to substantially change the influence of conformity is a revolution in current philosophical thought or in the current dynamics by which complex systems are thought to work.

It may seem hard to understand why social scientific evidence has not played a more significant role in my analysis of conformity. To address this concern, I will examine the types of social scientific evidence available today and their relevance on the issue of conformity. My primary concern will be whether the evidence I examine is able to pinpoint important instances of conformity in today’s real world and whether it is able to convince us that the type of conformity discovered is undesirable.

An important and famous experiment related to conformity is Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment. The findings were quite extreme. When average people were selected from a pool of volunteers and randomly divided into guards and prisoners, all participants drastically changed their behavior to fit the role they were playing. As F. Neil Brady summarizes,

Zimbargo’s experiment leaves no doubt that conformity to social roles can be an extremely powerful force. This conformity turned out to have particularly negative effects in this experiment. Does the experiment tell us something about human behavior in general? One might argue that the experiment was conducted in a way that excited the volunteers with an artificial environment reminiscent of Hollywood movies. For example, during the experiment "Prisoners were ‘arrested,’ blindfolded, and taken to prison...Guards, on the other hand, were dressed in khaki uniforms and other symbols of authority, including silvered sunglasses" (Brady, 705). No volunteer is likely to have perceived this as just another mundane experience of their lives, while real prison guards will certainly come to view their jobs as mundane. Another important consideration is whether the outcome would have been positive under different circumstances. One might imagine an experiment with volunteers who simulate a school’s classroom environment turns into a healthy and interactive experience for all because the volunteers are assuming that their role is to help and tolerate each other rather than disciplining each other. Thus, the knowledge of what happens under one specific set of circumstances (as has been gained from Zimbargo’s experiment) may be interesting in itself, but really does not give us any new understanding of human potentialities we did not know existed before or what types of conformity exist in the real world. It successfully convinces us that police violence is undesirable, but this, too, is not anything new.

The more typical experiment that is designed to directly address conformity actually turns out to be even less revealing (or interesting, for that matter). It consists of a group of volunteers who are asked to make judgment either alone or in groups of varying sizes. These judgments often consist of things like comparing the length of lines, comparing the volume of noises, or describing what was seen on a particular film strip. Usually, the correct (if applicable) answers are fairly straightforward, and overall, the experiments always verify the existence of a strong tendency toward conformity which increases with larger sized groups. These studies may be interesting to muse over, but they do not add any understanding to conformity that each of us hasn’t had before. We have all felt pressured to go along with a group at one time or another and with a little bit of introspection we can even become aware of the many individual instances in which we tend to conform in our day-to-day lives. Of course, the more is at stake the more likely we are to assert our own viewpoints, decisions, and intentions. But how much is at stake in a mere experiment; why should volunteers make themselves feel uncomfortable? What about people’s ability to defy conformity if they try? The vast majority (if not all) of contemporary experiments on conformity not only fail to answer these questions, but their only power seems to be to fatalistically analyze how we behave, assuming that all other factors will remain equal for eternity. The truly vicious type of conformity, the type in which the subject completely feels himself to be following his own independent choices, is not even addressed and couldn’t be, since an experiment has to be simple enough to yield clear and accurate data.

Another type of social scientific evidence focuses on the theoretical side. To make them more tenable and give them the added appeal of ‘rigor,’ they usually explain conformity using highly complex mathematical models. These theories usually make use of utility functions to model human preferences and needs and calculate choices individuals would make provided they act in their own self-interest. As an example, a recent paper claims to be particularly innovative because of its ability to explain "localized conformity". It states, "None of these [currently published] theories explains why mass behavior is often fragile in the sense that small shocks can frequently lead to large shifts in behavior" (Bikchandani, 992). The whole gist of the paper is that one can devise a mathematical simulation in which it becomes advantageous for an individual to follow someone ahead of him without understanding why this action is wise. The authors of the paper churn out 20 pages worth of probability and utility functions. Another paper, titled "A Theory of Conformity," also claims to explain customs and fads (synonyms for localized conformity). It models "social interaction in which individuals care about status as well as ‘intrinsic’ utility (which refers to utility derived directly from consumption)" (Bernheim, 841). The paper based all its mathematics on these simple assumptions. These types of economic theories are often criticized for their practical irrelevance and this is indeed right. The mathematical constructs these economists use depend on fundamental assumptions about human behavior. These are used to deterministically derive large-scale patterns of behavior that emerge from the actions and interaction of many individuals. The problem with this approach is that since the fundamental laws of human behavior are assumed to be known and fixed, the models will always yield utterly fatalistic predictions. These theories can explain ‘what is,’ and at the same time are useless for suggesting ‘what could be different.’

A final type of social scientific evidence that I will discuss is the historical type. It tends to be quite illuminating because it allows us to see where earlier societies have conformed and while we have stopped conforming. An excellent example is that of Tasmania, an island south of Australia where a population of about 5000 inhabitants lived isolated for tens of thousands of years. The development of this Tasmanian culture was very different from any society that lived in contact with a greater number of tribes. A recent article by Jared Diamond cites conclusive evidence that the Tasmanians abandoned at least two practices in their period of isolation (54). One was the production of bone tools. One important use of bones is to make needles to sew clothes; the Tasmanians therefore learned to live naked in their cold and windy climate. The other was the practice of eating fish. The Tasmanians had learned to avoid this food despite their low-protein diet which would have benefited from eating fish. Other isolated cultures have been observed to go through similar developments. Diamond’s article also mentions isolated tribes on the Pacific Islands that have decided to taboo pigs and killed them. In cultures that have more contact with a variety of tribes these tendencies are often corrected. Some tribes that tabooed pigs go on to reimport them from other tribes once they realize that they have deprived themselves of an important food source. Overall, the article suggests that societies often conform to myths and folklore that may suggest unwise practices. For us, it may be easy to look back at these societies and regard the type conformity that prevailed in them as foolish or clearly unwise. The very reason why we are able to do this is because we have a different way of looking at the world. To tackle present-day conformity, we need knowledge of how the world could be different, for then we will be able to see where we conformed without knowing it or without suspecting its danger.

Knowledge of how the world could be different also gives us a way of judging whether or not conformity in a particular instance is desirable. For instance, a behavior pattern, no matter how repulsive it may appear, cannot be fruitfully condemned as evil if no better alternative is thought to exist for it. In other case, a ‘normal’ behavior pattern may turn out to be pathological once we become aware of a superior alternative to it. Thus, the awareness of alternatives to our present world will help us judge the desirability of conformity. Finding those alternatives necessarily involves a great deal of speculation and is a venture into the unknown.

As a concluding question I ask if the speculative nature of analyzing conformity makes it worthwhile. In other words, do we need relevant and comprehensive empirical data in order to discuss a topic intelligently? I think there is a possibility of finding both reliable and practical ways of describing, predicting, and deciding that do not rely predominantly on ‘hard evidence’. If it is true that conformity has become outdated because the ways of the past do not necessarily work well in the future, then it may equally be true that reliance on evidence of how things have worked under one particular set of circumstances may turn out to be more and more ineffective in an increasingly complex world. I shall continue to discuss this possibility in a future work and through a much more powerful type of perspective.