That we have found the tendency to conformity in our society so strong . . . is a matter of concern. It raises questions about our ways of education and about the values that guide our conduct.1
It is not a trivial question whether the subjects of Asch’s experiments behaved irrationally. Robert Aumann’s Agreement Theorem shows that honest Bayesians cannot agree to disagree—if they have common knowledge of their probability estimates, they have the same probability estimate. Aumann’s Agreement Theorem was proved more than twenty years after Asch’s experiments, but it only formalizes and strengthens an intuitively obvious point—other people’s beliefs are often legitimate evidence.
If you were looking at a diagram like the one above, but you knew for a fact that the other people in the experiment were honest and seeing the same diagram as you, and three other people said that C was the same size as X, then what are the odds that only you are the one who’s right? I lay claim to no advantage of visual reasoning—I don’t think I’m better than an average human at judging whether two lines are the same size. In terms of individual rationality, I hope I would notice my own severe confusion and then assign >50% probability to the majority vote.
In terms of group rationality, seems to me that the proper thing for an honest rationalist to say is, “How surprising, it looks to me like B is the same size as X. But if we’re all looking at the same diagram and reporting honestly, I have no reason to believe that my assessment is better than yours.” The last sentence is important—it’s a much weaker claim of disagreement than, “Oh, I see the optical illusion—I understand why you think it’s C, of course, but the real answer is B.”
So the conforming subjects in these experiments are not automatically convicted of irrationality, based on what I’ve described so far. But as you might expect, the devil is in the details of the experimental results. According to a meta-analysis of over a hundred replications by Smith and Bond:2
Conformity increases strongly up to 3 confederates, but doesn’t increase further up to 10–15 confederates. If people are conforming rationally, then the opinion of 15 other subjects should be substantially stronger evidence than the opinion of 3 other subjects.
Adding a single dissenter—just one other person who gives the correct answer, or even an incorrect answer that’s different from the group’s incorrect answer—reduces conformity very sharply, down to 5–10% of subjects. If you’re applying some intuitive version of Aumann’s Agreement to think that when 1 person disagrees with 3 people, the 3 are probably right, then in most cases you should be equally willing to think that 2 people will disagree with 6 people. (Not automatically true, but true ceteris paribus.) On the other hand, if you’ve got people who are emotionally nervous about being the odd one out, then it’s easy to see how a single other person who agrees with you, or even a single other person who disagrees with the group, would make you much less nervous.
Unsurprisingly, subjects in the one-dissenter condition did not think their nonconformity had been influenced or enabled by the dissenter. Like the 90% of drivers who think they’re above-average in the top 50%, some of them may be right about this, but not all. People are not self-aware of the causes of their conformity or dissent, which weighs against trying to argue them as manifestations of rationality. For example, in the hypothesis that people are socially-rationally choosing to lie in order to not stick out, it appears that (at least some) subjects in the one-dissenter condition do not consciously anticipate the “conscious strategy” they would employ when faced with unanimous opposition.
When the single dissenter suddenly switched to conforming to the group, subjects’ conformity rates went back up to just as high as in the no-dissenter condition. Being the first dissenter is a valuable (and costly!) social service, but you’ve got to keep it up.
Consistently within and across experiments, all-female groups (a female subject alongside female confederates) conform significantly more often than all-male groups. Around one-half the women conform more than half the time, versus a third of the men. If you argue that the average subject is rational, then apparently women are too agreeable and men are too disagreeable, so neither group is actually rational . . .
Ingroup-outgroup manipulations (e.g., a handicapped subject alongside other handicapped subjects) similarly show that conformity is significantly higher among members of an ingroup.
Conformity is lower in the case of blatant diagrams, like the one at the beginning of this essay, versus diagrams where the errors are more subtle. This is hard to explain if (all) the subjects are making a socially rational decision to avoid sticking out.
Paul Crowley reminds me to note that when subjects can respond in a way that will not be seen by the group, conformity also drops, which also argues against an Aumann interpretation.
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1. Solomon E. Asch, “Studies of Independence and Conformity: A Minority of One Against a Unanimous Majority,” Psychological Monographs 70 (1956).
2. Rod Bond and Peter B. Smith, “Culture and Conformity: A Meta-Analysis of Studies Using Asch’s (1952b, 1956) Line Judgment Task,” Psychological Bulletin 119 (1996): 111–137.
118
On Expressing Your Concerns
The scary thing about Asch’s conformity experiments is that you can get many people to say black is white, if you put them in a room full of other people saying the same thing. The hopeful thing about Asch’s conformity experiments is that a single dissenter tremendously drove down the rate of conformity, even if the dissenter was only giving a different wrong answer. And the wearisome thing is that dissent was not learned over the course of the experiment—when the single dissenter started siding with the group, rates of conformity rose back up.
Being a voice of dissent can bring real benefits to the group. But it also (famously) has a cost. And then you have to keep it up. Plus you could be wrong.
I recently had an interesting experience wherein I began discussing a project with two people who had previously done some planning on their own. I thought they were being too optimistic and made a number of safety-margin-type suggestions for the project. Soon a fourth guy wandered by, who was providing one of the other two with a ride home, and began making suggestions. At this point I had a sudden insight about how groups become overconfident, because whenever I raised a possible problem, the fourth guy would say, “Don’t worry, I’m sure we can handle it!” or something similarly reassuring.
An individual, working alone, will have natural doubts. They will think to themselves “Can I really do XYZ?,” because there’s nothing impolite about doubting your own competence. But when two unconfident people form a group, it is polite to say nice and reassuring things, and impolite to question the other person’s competence. Together they become more optimistic than either would be on their own, each one’s doubts quelled by the other’s seemingly confident reassurance, not realizing that the other person initially had the same inner doubts.
The most fearsome possibility raised by Asch’s experiments on conformity is the specter of everyone agreeing with the group, swayed by the confident voices of others, careful not to let their own doubts show—not realizing that others are suppressing similar worries. This is known as “pluralistic ignorance.”
Robin Hanson and I have a long-running debate over when, exactly, aspiring rationalists should dare to disagree. I tend toward the widely held position that you have no real choice but to form your own opinions. Robin Hanson advocates a more iconoclastic position, that you—not just other people—should consider that others may be wiser. Regardless of our various disputes, we both agree that Aumann’s Agreement Theorem extends to imply that common knowledge of a factual disagreement shows someone must be irrational. Despite the funny looks we’ve gotten, we’re sticking to our guns about modesty: Forget what everyone tells you about individualism, you should pay attention to what other people think.
Ahem. The point is that, for rationalists, disagreeing with the group is serious business. You
can’t wave it off with “Everyone is entitled to their own opinion.”
I think the most important lesson to take away from Asch’s experiments is to distinguish “expressing concern” from “disagreement.” Raising a point that others haven’t voiced is not a promise to disagree with the group at the end of its discussion.
The ideal Bayesian’s process of convergence involves sharing evidence that is unpredictable to the listener. The Aumann agreement result holds only for common knowledge, where you know, I know, you know I know, etc. Hanson’s post or paper on “We Can’t Foresee to Disagree” provides a picture of how strange it would look to watch ideal rationalists converging on a probability estimate; it doesn’t look anything like two bargainers in a marketplace converging on a price.
Unfortunately, there’s not much difference socially between “expressing concerns” and “disagreement.” A group of rationalists might agree to pretend there’s a difference, but it’s not how human beings are really wired. Once you speak out, you’ve committed a socially irrevocable act; you’ve become the nail sticking up, the discord in the comfortable group harmony, and you can’t undo that. Anyone insulted by a concern you expressed about their competence to successfully complete task XYZ, will probably hold just as much of a grudge afterward if you say “No problem, I’ll go along with the group” at the end.
Asch’s experiment shows that the power of dissent to inspire others is real. Asch’s experiment shows that the power of conformity is real. If everyone refrains from voicing their private doubts, that will indeed lead groups into madness. But history abounds with lessons on the price of being the first, or even the second, to say that the Emperor has no clothes. Nor are people hardwired to distinguish “expressing a concern” from “disagreement even with common knowledge”; this distinction is a rationalist’s artifice. If you read the more cynical brand of self-help books (e.g., Machiavelli’s The Prince) they will advise you to mask your nonconformity entirely, not voice your concerns first and then agree at the end. If you perform the group service of being the one who gives voice to the obvious problems, don’t expect the group to thank you for it.
These are the costs and the benefits of dissenting—whether you “disagree” or just “express concern”—and the decision is up to you.
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119
Lonely Dissent
Asch’s conformity experiment showed that the presence of a single dissenter tremendously reduced the incidence of “conforming” wrong answers. Individualism is easy, experiment shows, when you have company in your defiance. Every other subject in the room, except one, says that black is white. You become the second person to say that black is black. And it feels glorious: the two of you, lonely and defiant rebels, against the world! (Followup interviews showed that subjects in the one-dissenter condition expressed strong feelings of camaraderie with the dissenter—though, of course, they didn’t think the presence of the dissenter had influenced their own nonconformity.)
But you can only join the rebellion, after someone, somewhere, becomes the first to rebel. Someone has to say that black is black after hearing everyone else, one after the other, say that black is white. And that—experiment shows—is a lot harder.
Lonely dissent doesn’t feel like going to school dressed in black. It feels like going to school wearing a clown suit.
That’s the difference between joining the rebellion and leaving the pack.
If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s fakeness—you may have noticed this. Well, lonely dissent has got to be one of the most commonly, most ostentatiously faked characteristics around. Everyone wants to be an iconoclast.
I don’t mean to degrade the act of joining a rebellion. There are rebellions worth joining. It does take courage to brave the disapproval of your peer group, or perhaps even worse, their shrugs. Needless to say, going to a rock concert is not rebellion. But, for example, vegetarianism is. I’m not a vegetarian myself, but I respect people who are, because I expect it takes a noticeable amount of quiet courage to tell people that hamburgers won’t work for dinner. (Albeit that in the Bay Area, people ask as a matter of routine.)
Still, if you tell people that you’re a vegetarian, they’ll think they understand your motives (even if they don’t). They may disagree. They may be offended if you manage to announce it proudly enough, or for that matter, they may be offended just because they’re easily offended. But they know how to relate to you.
When someone wears black to school, the teachers and the other children understand the role thereby being assumed in their society. It’s Outside the System—in a very standard way that everyone recognizes and understands. Not, y’know, actually outside the system. It’s a Challenge to Standard Thinking, of a standard sort, so that people indignantly say “I can’t understand why you—” but don’t have to actually think any thoughts they had not thought before. As the saying goes, “Has any of the ‘subversive literature’ you’ve read caused you to modify any of your political views?”
What takes real courage is braving the outright incomprehension of the people around you, when you do something that isn’t Standard Rebellion #37, something for which they lack a ready-made script. They don’t hate you for a rebel, they just think you’re, like, weird, and turn away. This prospect generates a much deeper fear. It’s the difference between explaining vegetarianism and explaining cryonics. There are other cryonicists in the world, somewhere, but they aren’t there next to you. You have to explain it, alone, to people who just think it’s weird. Not forbidden, but outside bounds that people don’t even think about. You’re going to get your head frozen? You think that’s going to stop you from dying? What do you mean, brain information? Huh? What? Are you crazy?
I’m tempted to essay a post facto explanation in evolutionary psychology: You could get together with a small group of friends and walk away from your hunter-gatherer band, but having to go it alone in the forests was probably a death sentence—at least reproductively. We don’t reason this out explicitly, but that is not the nature of evolutionary psychology. Joining a rebellion that everyone knows about is scary, but nowhere near as scary as doing something really differently. Something that in ancestral times might have ended up, not with the band splitting, but with you being driven out alone.
As the case of cryonics testifies, the fear of thinking really different is stronger than the fear of death. Hunter-gatherers had to be ready to face death on a routine basis, hunting large mammals, or just walking around in a world that contained predators. They needed that courage in order to live. Courage to defy the tribe’s standard ways of thinking, to entertain thoughts that seem truly weird—well, that probably didn’t serve its bearers as well. We don’t reason this out explicitly; that’s not how evolutionary psychology works. We human beings are just built in such fashion that many more of us go skydiving than sign up for cryonics.
And that’s not even the highest courage. There’s more than one cryonicist in the world. Only Robert Ettinger had to say it first.
To be a scientific revolutionary, you’ve got to be the first person to contradict what everyone else you know is thinking. This is not the only route to scientific greatness; it is rare even among the great. No one can become a scientific revolutionary by trying to imitate revolutionariness. You can only get there by pursuing the correct answer in all things, whether the correct answer is revolutionary or not. But if, in the due course of time—if, having absorbed all the power and wisdom of the knowledge that has already accumulated—if, after all that and a dose of sheer luck, you find your pursuit of mere correctness taking you into new territory . . . then you have an opportunity for your courage to fail.
This is the true courage of lonely dissent, which every damn rock band out there tries to fake.
Of course not everything that takes courage is a good idea. It would take courage to walk off a cliff, but then you would just go splat.
The fear of lonely dissent is a hindrance to good ideas,
but not every dissenting idea is good. See also Robin Hanson’s Against Free Thinkers. Most of the difficulty in having a new true scientific thought is in the “true” part.
It really isn’t necessary to be different for the sake of being different. If you do things differently only when you see an overwhelmingly good reason, you will have more than enough trouble to last you the rest of your life.
There are a few genuine packs of iconoclasts around. The Church of the SubGenius, for example, seems to genuinely aim at confusing the mundanes, not merely offending them. And there are islands of genuine tolerance in the world, such as science fiction conventions. There are certain people who have no fear of departing the pack. Many fewer such people really exist, than imagine themselves rebels; but they do exist. And yet scientific revolutionaries are tremendously rarer. Ponder that.
Now me, you know, I really am an iconoclast. Everyone thinks they are, but with me it’s true, you see. I would totally have worn a clown suit to school. My serious conversations were with books, not with other children.
But if you think you would totally wear that clown suit, then don’t be too proud of that either! It just means that you need to make an effort in the opposite direction to avoid dissenting too easily. That’s what I have to do, to correct for my own nature. Other people do have reasons for thinking what they do, and ignoring that completely is as bad as being afraid to contradict them. You wouldn’t want to end up as a free thinker. It’s not a virtue, you see—just a bias either way.
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120
Cultish Countercultishness
In the modern world, joining a cult is probably one of the worse things that can happen to you. The best-case scenario is that you’ll end up in a group of sincere but deluded people, making an honest mistake but otherwise well-behaved, and you’ll spend a lot of time and money but end up with nothing to show. Actually, that could describe any failed Silicon Valley startup. Which is supposed to be a hell of a harrowing experience, come to think. So yes, very scary.
Rationality- From AI to Zombies Page 43
