Beyond Feelings - Vincent Ruggiero [32]
Ironically, even groups pledged to fight conformity can generate strong pressure to conform. As many young people in the 1960s learned to their dismay, many "hippie" communes were as intolerant to dissenting ideas, values, styles of dress and living as the "straight" society they rebelled against.
The urge to conform on occasion clashes with the tendency to resist change. If the group we are in advocates an idea or action that is new and strange to us, we can be torn between seeking the group's acceptance and maintaining the security of familiar ideas and behavior. In such cases, the way we turn will depend on which tendency is stronger in us or which value we are more committed to. More often, however, the two tendencies do not conflict but reinforce each other, for we tend to associate with those whose attitudes and actions are similar to our own.
"GROUPTHINK"
The urge to conform can cripple thought. Yale psychologist Irving L. Janis intensively analyzed several important actions by U.S. Government leaders, actions that later were shown to be foolish. The actions were Franklin D. Roosevelt's failure to be ready for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Harry S. Truman's decision to invade North Korea, John F. Kennedy's plan to invade Cuba, and Lyndon B. Johnson's decision to escalate the Vietnam war. In each case Janis found that the people who made the decision exhibited a strong desire to concur in the group decision. Janis named this conformist tendency "groupthink."1
More specifically, Janis identified a number of major defects in decision making that could be attributed to this conformity. The groups he analyzed did not survey the range of choices but focused on a few. When they discovered that their initial decision had certain drawbacks, they failed to reconsider those decisions. They almost never tested their won thinking for weaknesses. They never tried to obtain the judgments of experts. They expressed interest only in those views that reinforced the positions they preferred, and they spent little time considering the obstacles that would hinder the success of their plans. In each of the cases Janis studied, these defects in thinking cost untold human suffering.
The harm caused by the urge to conform in other areas is perhaps less dramatic but no less real. A single example will suggest the extent of that harm. For two or three decades many educational psychologists argued that failure in school is traumatic and students should be passed from grade to grade even if they have not mastered the required knowledge and skills. Many grade and high schools operated on this principle. The few psychologists and teachers who disputed it were classified as unprogressive. Yet now it is being recognized that the struggle to acquire basic reading, writing, and arithmetic skills is much more traumatic at age eighteen than at age eight.
AVOIDING MINDLESS CONFORMITY.
Some people believe the way to avoid conformity is simply to oppose the majority view. It is not. Opposing a particular view because the majority endorse it is no different form endorsing the view because the majority endorse it. In both cases our judgment is determined by what others think. And that makes us conformists.
Other people believe the way to avoid conformity is to ignore what everyone else thinks and decide on the basis of our own ideas alone. This, too, is a mistake. It protects us from other people's foolishness, but it leaves us prey to our own. Consulting informed people, either in person or through their public statements in interviews, articles, and books, is an important part of the process of examining an issue. Other people's vies are thus part of the evidence we must consider in forming a judgment.
The secret of avoiding mindless conformity is neither to prefer the majority or the minority view nor to be selective in the evidence we consider. It is to apply our critical thinking to all the evidence and endorse the most reasonable view regardless of who or how