Conformity Read online

  Alexis de Tocqueville explained the decline of the French church in the mid-eighteenth century in these terms: “Those who retained their beliefs in the doctrines of the Church . . . dreading isolation more than error, professed to share the sentiments of the majority. So what was in reality the opinion of only a part . . . of the nation came to be regarded as the will of all and for this reason seemed irresistible, even to those who had given it this false appearance.”39 Or consider, as a chilling example, the suggestion from a killer of Mostar during the Bosnian war that his actions were not a product of his convictions about the evil character of those he was killing. On the contrary, many of them were his former friends. His explanation was that he had to do what he did to remain a part of his Serbian community.40

  There is a final wrinkle. In the settings discussed thus far, dissenters proceed at their peril and nonconformity is punished. This will be my emphasis throughout. But in some contexts, dissenters might be attempting to improve their own prospects, and dissenting might be a sensible way of doing that. Dissenters may be self-serving, and they may be trying to spur their stalled careers. It happens all the time. People who run a website might become popular because of their iconoclastic or even wild views. A political dissenter, challenging some widespread practice, sometimes becomes more prominent and more successful as a result. Judges who dissent in high-profile cases might not greatly fear that their reputation will be harmed; they might think the dissent will redound to their benefit.

  The point is strengthened once we consider the fact that a nation consists of countless communities with a wide range of values and beliefs. Public dissenters might impair their reputation in one group but simultaneously strengthen it in another. On a radio show, on Facebook, or on Twitter, they might be saying, “Look at me!” And if people look at them, they might be able to advance in some way that matters to them. Of course, some people say and do exactly what they think and do not greatly care about their reputations; they want to add information. They are rebels with a cause.

  But return to my main concern. Too much of the time, people do not want to lose the good opinion of relevant others, and the result of this desire is to reduce the information that the public obtains. Apart from information, people might have preferences and values. They might believe that new immigrants should be welcomed. They might believe in animal rights. But in either case they might not reveal what they think, simply because of the pressure to conform. I have suggested that from the standpoint of democratic practice, this is a problem as well. Most of the time, it is valuable for people to disclose what they want and what they value. The basic findings, as in the urn experiments, would undoubtedly be the same for preferences and values as well as facts, with rewards for conformity greatly increasing the apparent (not real) degree of agreement.

  This point helps explain why “unpopular or dysfunctional norms may survive even in the presence of a huge, silent majority of dissenters.”41 Fearing the wrath of others, people might not publicly contest practices and values that they privately abhor. The practice of sexual harassment long predated the idea of sexual harassment, and the innumerable women who were subject to harassment did not like it. But too much of the time they were silent, partly because they feared the consequences of public complaint. It is interesting to speculate about the possibility that many current practices fall in the same general category: those that produce harm, and are known to produce harm, but persist because most of those who are harmed believe they will suffer if they object in public.

  Reputational Cascades

  If conformity pressures are taken seriously, we can see the possibility of reputational cascades, parallel to their informational sibling.42 In a reputational cascade, people think they know what is right, or what is likely to be right, but they nonetheless go along with the crowd. Even the most confident people sometimes fall prey to this process, silencing themselves in the process. In fact, the conformity-rewarding version of the urn experiment is an elegant example of a reputational cascade. It is thus possible to exploit the influence of peer pressure, found in the conformity experiments, to show how many social movements become possible.

  Suppose that Albert suggests that genetically modified foods are a serious problem and that Barbara concurs publicly with Albert, not because she actually agrees with Albert but because she does not wish to seem, to Albert, to be ignorant or indifferent to human health and environmental protection. If Albert and Barbara agree that genetically modified foods are a serious problem, Cynthia might not contradict them publicly and might even seem to share their judgment, not because she believes the judgment to be correct but because she does not want to face the hostility or lose the good opinion of others. It is easy to see how this process might generate a cascade. Once Albert, Barbara, and Cynthia offer a united front on the issue, their friend David might be most reluctant to contradict them even if he thinks they are wrong. We could use the same stylized facts to describe enthusiasm for current political leaders, a stated belief that all is going well in the workplace, and an apparent commitment to any particular ideology.

  In the actual world of group decisions, people are of course uncertain whether publicly expressed statements are a product of independent knowledge, participation in an informational cascade, or reputational pressure. It is reasonable to think that much of the time, listeners and observers overstate the extent to which the actions of others are based on independent information.

  Reputational cascades occur in the private sector. They happen within companies, within nonprofits, and within religious organizations. They also arise within all branches of government. Of course legislators are vulnerable to reputational pressures. That is part of their job. When elected representatives suddenly support legislation to deal with an apparent (sometimes not real) crisis, they are involved in a reputational cascade. Consider, for example, the rush in the United States, in July 2002, to enact measures to deal with corporate corruption.43 Undoubtedly many legislators had private qualms about the very legislation they supported, and some of them probably disapproved of measures for which they nonetheless voted. I do not mean to take a stand on the relevant legislation. Perhaps it was a terrific idea. The only point is that the widespread support was a product, in part, of a reputational cascade.

  As a more vivid example, consider the unanimous (!) disapproval, by members of the U.S. Senate, of the court of appeals decision to strike down the use of the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance.44 In both cases, some legislators were involved in a reputational cascade, repressing their private doubts in order to avoid injury to their reputations.

  I have emphasized that in an informational cascade, the most serious problem is that the group fails to receive privately held information. Exactly the same problem arises in a reputational cascade, where members of the group or the public are also unable to learn what many people know and think. Here people silence themselves not because they believe they are wrong but because they do not want to face the disapproval that, they think, would follow from expressing the view they believe to be correct. The problem and the result are pluralistic ignorance: ignorance, on the part of most or all, of what most people actually think.45 In the face of pluralistic ignorance, people can assume, wrongly, that others have a certain view, and they alter their statements and actions accordingly.

  Under certain conditions, this self-censorship is an extremely serious social loss. For example, Communism was long able to sustain itself in Eastern Europe not only because of force but also because people believed, wrongly, that most people supported the existing regime.46 The fall of Communism was made possible only by the disclosure of privately held views, which turned pluralistic ignorance into something closer to pluralistic knowledge. As we shall see, self-censoring can undermine success during war. Reputational pressures also help fuel ethnic identifications, sometimes producing high levels of hostility among groups for which, merely a generation before, such identifications were unimpo
rtant and hostility was barely imaginable. And if certain views are punished, unpopular views might eventually be lost to public debate, so that what was once “unthinkable” is now “unthought.”47 Views that were originally taboo, and offered rarely or not at all, become excised entirely, simply because they have not been heard. Here too those who do not care about their reputation, and who say what they really think, perform a valuable public service, often at their own expense.

  Various civil liberties, including freedom of speech, can be seen as an effort to insulate people from the pressure to conform, and the reason is not only to protect private rights but also to protect the public against the risk of self-silencing. A memorable claim by the philosopher Joseph Raz clarifies the point: “If I were to choose between living in a society which enjoys freedom of expression, but not having the right myself, or enjoying the right in a society which does not have it, I would have no hesitation in judging that my own personal interest is better served by the first option.”48 The claim makes sense in light of the fact that a system of free speech confers countless benefits on people who do not much care about exercising that right. Consider the fact that in the history of the world, no society with democratic elections and free speech has ever experienced a famine49—a demonstration of the extent to which political liberty protects people who do not exercise it.

  Freedom of association is especially noteworthy here, because it allows people to band together in groups in which the ordinary incentive to conform might be absent or even reversed. Society in general might punish certain political views, but associations can be found in which those views are tolerated or even encouraged. Many movements have been made possible in that way, including the movements for sex equality, environmentalism, religious liberty, and the American Revolution itself. The secret ballot can be seen in related terms. One advantage of the secret ballot is that it reduces informational pressures, leading voters to express their own preferences and to be less influenced by the views of others. (Recall the majority-rewarding version of the urn experiment.) But the more obvious advantage is that the voters can act anonymously and cast their ballots without fear of opprobrium.

  Just as informational cascades may be limited in their reach, there can be local reputational cascades—those that reshape the public pronouncements of particular subgroups without affecting those of the broader society. When certain subgroups believe that some dishonorable political cause is very important, that nonexistent risks are actually quite serious, or that some hopeless medical treatment produces miracle cures, local reputational cascades might well be involved, simply because local skeptics do not speak out. On Facebook, local reputational cascades happen every day.

  Of course informational influences interact with reputational ones. A few decades ago, for example, South Africa experienced the literally deadly phenomenon of “AIDS denial,” with prominent leaders suggesting that AIDS is not a real disease but instead a conspiracy to sell certain drugs to poor people. In that case, a cascade did develop, but it was based mostly on transmission of alleged facts (fake news), not on fear of reputational harm.50 But if we emphasize reputational pressures, we can identity an important reason for the persistence of unusual and baseless beliefs—about facts and values—among various communities of like-minded people. It is often tempting to attribute such differences to deep historical or cultural factors, but the real source, much of the time, is reputational pressure.

  Political leaders often play an important role in building that pressure. If leaders insist that something is true or that the nation should pursue a certain course of action, some citizens might well be reluctant to dissent, if only because of a fear of public disapproval. Here as elsewhere, the result can be serious social loss. And here again a strong system of civil liberties, and an insistence on making a safe space for enclaves of dissenters, can be justified not as an effort to protect individual rights but as a safeguard against social blunders. A market system aggregates and spreads information better than any planner could possibly do.51 In the same way, a system of free expression and dissent protects against the false confidence and the inevitable mistakes of planners, both private and public.

  It would make little sense to say that cascades, in general, are good or bad. Sometimes cascade effects will overcome group or public torpor, by generating concern about serious though previously ignored problems. Sometimes cascade effects will make people far more worried than they would otherwise be and produce large-scale distortions in private judgments, public policy, and law. The antislavery movement had distinctive cascade-like features, as did the environmental movement in the United States, the fall of Communism, the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, and the #MeToo movement of 2017 and 2018; so too with Mao’s Cultural Revolution and the rise of Nazism in Germany. Typically, cascades are quite fragile, precisely because people’s commitments are based on little private information. What I have emphasized here is the serious risk that social cascades can lead to widespread errors, factual or otherwise.

  Boundedly Rational Cascades

  Thus far the discussion has assumed that people are largely rational—that they take account, rationally, of the information provided by the statements and actions of others and that they care, sensibly enough, about their reputation. The principal exception, suggested above, is that people may mistake a cascade for a large number of independent decisions. But it is well known that human beings are “boundedly rational.” In most domains, people use heuristics, or mental shortcuts, and they also show identifiable biases.52 Indeed, following others can itself be seen as a heuristic, one that usually works well but that also misfires in some cases. And for other heuristics and for every bias, there is a corresponding possibility of a cascade.

  Consider, for example, the availability heuristic, which has probably become the most well known in public policy and law.53 When people use the availability heuristic, they answer a hard question about probability by asking whether examples come readily to mind. How likely is a flood, an earthquake, an airplane crash, a traffic jam, a terrorist attack, or a disaster at a nuclear power plant? Lacking statistical knowledge, people try to think of illustrations. For people without statistical knowledge—which is to say most people—it is hardly irrational to use the availability heuristic. The problem is that this heuristic can lead to serious errors of fact, in the form of excessive fear of small risks and neglect of large ones. And indeed both surveys and actual behavior show extensive use of the availability heuristic. Whether people will buy insurance for natural disasters is greatly affected by recent experiences.54 If floods have not occurred in the immediate past, people who live on flood plains are far less likely to purchase insurance. In the aftermath of an earthquake, insurance for earthquakes rises sharply—but it declines steadily from that point, as vivid memories recede.

  For present purposes, the key point is that the availability heuristic does not operate in a social vacuum. Whether an incident is “available” is a function of social interactions. These interactions rapidly spread salient illustrations within relevant communities, making those illustrations available to many or most. Sometimes the processes are intensely local. Should swimmers worry about shark attacks? Do immigrants commit a lot of crimes? Does gun control save lives? Are young girls likely to be abducted? In all of these cases, the United States has seen “availability cascades,”55 in which salient examples were rapidly spread from one person to the next. Availability cascades are equally common elsewhere; in the first decades of the twenty-first century, Russia, Germany, France, Italy, and Mexico experienced many of their own.

  Note that this process typically involves information. If some people use a recent assault to show there is a serious risk of crime ten blocks north, or a recent airplane accident to show that it is unsafe to fly, their statements carry a certain authority, leading others to believe they are true. And in the case of shark attacks, violent crime by immigrants, and abduction of young girls, the media spread
a few gripping examples, apparently providing information that was rapidly transmitted to millions of people. But reputational forces play a role as well. Much of the time, people are reluctant to say that an example is misleading and hence that others’ fears are groundless. Efforts at correction may suggest stupidity or callousness, and a desire to avoid public opprobrium may produce a form of silencing.

  Availability cascades are ubiquitous. Vivid examples, alongside social interactions, help account for decisions to purchase insurance against natural disasters. Cascade effects explain the existence of widespread public concern about abandoned hazardous waste dumps (a relatively trivial environmental hazard). Availability cascades have spurred public fears not only of shark attacks, immigration, and abductions of girls but also of the pesticide Alar, plane crashes, and school shootings. Such effects helped produce massive dislocations in beef production in Europe in connection with “mad cow disease”; they help also to account for the outpouring of fear of Ebola in the United States and Europe during the second decade of the twenty-first century. They certainly spurred the #MeToo movement in Sweden, the United States, and elsewhere.

  My suggestion is not that in all or most of these cases, availability cascades led to excessive or inappropriate reactions. On the contrary, such cascades sometimes have the valuable effect of promoting public attention to serious but neglected problems. The suggestion is only that the intensity of public reactions is best understood by seeing the interaction between the availability heuristic and the cascade effects I have been emphasizing. The problem is that those interactions make some errors inevitable, simply because a heuristic, even if generally helpful, is bound to misfire in many cases. Here as elsewhere, dissent can be an important corrective. For organizations and governments, the question is how to make dissent less costly, or even to reward it, especially when dissenters benefit not themselves but others.