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Conformity
Compelled to Conform: When Tribal Ties Trump Truth
What we make of the facts depends on how they relate to our group.
Posted November 26, 2020 Reviewed by Lybi Ma
President Trump’s denial regarding his election loss was predictable and tedious. More interesting and consequential, though, was the reaction of others choosing to go along with him in the face of overwhelming evidence.
It’s likely that many of these people did so because they did not actually know or believe the truth; some no doubt were afraid of Trump himself—his cruelty and vindictiveness. But many of those who have remained silent or spoke of massive election fraud have surely recognized the fact of his defeat but were loath to voice the truth out of sheer conformity—yielding to group pressure.
The choice to put group loyalty before factual truth may appear odd and irrational at first glance, but it is neither.
To understand why, we first need to acknowledge a tension at the core of the human psyche between two foundational desires: to be and to belong. The desire to be involves our need to construct and express a unique coherent self that corresponds to our embodied physique and represents our singular combination of genetics and experience. This desire is evident in the existence of social processes (i.e., reputation) and structures (i.e., police) dedicated to ensuring individual compliance with group norms. If we didn’t have idiosyncratic, individual, selfish agency, we would not need all this heavy persuasion and enforcement. Where there’s no traffic, you don’t need a traffic light.
The desire to belong involves our need for love, support, and affiliation, without which we are unlikely to survive, let alone thrive. From birth and throughout our long childhood, we humans are dependent on others. As we mature, our path in life will be dictated to a large extent by our ability to find fit, support, and help in our social environment. In fact, our very sense of self is intricately bound with our social context, insofar as we glean much of our self-knowledge from how others react to us. The need to belong is evident in how we define ourselves by--and sacrifice in the name of--our group affiliations: nationality, family, gender, religion, etc.
The inherent tension between these two tendencies manifests in how we laud cohesive groups (i.e., army units), passionate crowds (i.e., march on Washington) and "teamwork" (i.e., NASA's moon mission) while at the same time applauding individuals who “do their own thing;” those who stand out from the crowd, and those who dare to stand up to the crowd, such as Galileo, Rosa Parks, or August Landmesser, the sole dissenter among a group of saluting Nazis in this famous photo.
Any consideration of group conformity is therefore also a consideration of individual agency and vice versa. This is evident, for example, in Solomon Asch’s classic study, which placed one naïve subject among a group of confederates instructed to provide wrong answers on a simple task (comparing the lengths of different lines). The test was whether the naïve subject would go along with the group or tell the evident truth. The results showed that naïve subjects went along with the group’s wrong answers about 35% of the time.
These findings have been largely taken as demonstrating the power of conformity. However, as the psychologist Bert Hodges cogently noted, they can just as well be viewed as evidence of the power of individuality and non-conformity, since 2/3 of participants in fact spoke the truth in the face of group consensus pressure.
Human behavior commonly manifests this dynamic tension. As Hodges notes: “Even young children act as if they are in a dialogical relationship with others and the world, rather than acting as if they are solo explorers or blind followers.“
One empirically supported framework by which to make sense of this tension is self-categorization theory, which argues that “the psychological nature of individuals…has to be apprehended within an understanding of groups and membership in society.” The self-categorization theory holds that “there is no such thing as objective reality testing isolated from social reality testing. Sensory data is always interpreted with respect of the beliefs and ideas of the perceiver, which in turn are bound up in the psychological group memberships of that perceiver.” In other words, what we make of the facts—how we value them—depends on how these facts relate to our group.
Now, the individual impulse to recognize the facts and speak the truth is compelling, in part because doing so tends to result in better survival consequences. Our brain is a prediction machine, and predictions tend to improve with better input data. From the point of view of evolution, the ability of an individual actor to diagnose correctly the situation and voice that diagnosis forcefully increases both the individual’s and the group’s survival advantage, because a correct diagnosis is more likely to beget the correct response.
Alas, our desire to discern and speak the truth (and experience the attendant self-assertion) is often much less powerful than the desire to protect our standing within the group. Rejection and isolation amount to social death. And social death is in some respects worse than physical death, since it is not a one-and-done. Physical death ends pain. Social death intensifies and prolongs it.
The benefits of conformity—conflict reduction, safety, protection—may often override the benefits of truth-telling and self-assertion. The truth may set us free. But before we can be free we must survive, and that is much harder to accomplish without the embrace of a cohesive, powerful group. Developmentally, we are socially dependent before we are self-reliant. Our psychology traffics in a similar calculus.
In the abstract, truth may be a higher value than loyalty. In Kohlberg’s famous hierarchy of moral reasoning, for example, the “universal ethical principle orientation” is higher than “social contract orientation.” But we don’t live in the abstract. Our lives are anchored in concrete social circumstances. Pragmatically, losing your social affiliation or status will often beget worse consequences than lying.
If all your friends, neighbors, peers, and colleagues announce that Trump has won the election, then insisting that he didn’t—even if it’s true; even if you truly believe it—will result in immediate, tangible adversity. Under these circumstances, going along with the lie hurts you less, in part because, unlike the lonely burden of truth-telling, the responsibility for the lie is diffused, shared with other group members.
The pressure toward group loyalty is compelling across group types. To wit: both police departments and criminal gangs uphold a strong code of silence. Those who violate the group consensus, break rank, and defy the party line often pay a steep price for their transgression, even if their truth-telling serves the group well. For example, even those who benefit from a whistleblower’s revelations will often harbor doubts about the whistleblower, suspecting that someone who’s capable of turning on their own is capable of turning on anyone. You may thank the stranger who stood up to kill your attacker, but you also fear them, because they’ve demonstrated that they are killers.
Now, it’s true that all of us are members of multiple groups at once, and that those groups may differ in their norms, values, and expectations. As an OSU football fan, I am against Michigan. But as a Midwesterner, I’m for Michigan. Which group norm do I conform to?
Self-categorization theory proposes that we conform to the norms of the group that’s most salient in a given context. Groups become salient by fulfilling two criteria: accessibility and fit. An “accessible” group is one that is most useful, present, and relevant to the situation. In the context of a political contest, one’s party affiliation is accessible; less so in the context of an athletic contest, like the Olympic games, in which national affiliations rule.
“Fit” is the extent to which group norms help to clarify differences between people in a particular context. In the context of the elections, the democrat-republican categorization “fits” insofar as it accounts for, and makes sense of, stark differences in people’s behavior.
By stirring incessant buzz and conflict, Trump has made his brand of Republican Party politics highly accessible and fit, and hence highly salient for his voters; little wonder so many of them opted for the warm shelter of group conformity over the cold, hard facts.
