• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

But conformity is not an admirable trait. Conformity is a cop-out. It threatens self-awareness. It can lead groups to enforce rigid and arbitrary rules. Adolescent groups with high levels of conformity experience more negative behavior—with group members and outsiders—than do groups with lower levels of conformity. Conformity can become dangerous, leading to unhealthy behaviors, and it goes against a teenager’s innate desire to form a unique identity. Why, then, is conformity so common?

In the mid-twentieth century, psychologists discovered that when asked to judge an ambiguous test, such as an optical illusion, individuals usually parroted the opinions of the other people in the room. In the 1950s, social psychologist Solomon Asch decided to gauge levels of conformity when the test answers were absolutely clear. Asch assumed that people wouldn’t bother to conform to an incorrect group opinion when the answer was obvious.

Asch was wrong—and his results stunned academia. For the experiment, he brought college students, one by one, into a room with six to eight other participants. He showed the room a picture of one line and a separate picture containing three lines labeled 1, 2, and 3. One of the three lines was the same length as the line in the first picture, while the other two differed by as much as several inches. Asch then had each volunteer call out the number of the line he believed to be the same length as the first. Unbeknownst to the college student, who was the last to be called on, the other participants were in on the experiment. Asch had instructed them to call out the wrong number on twelve out of eighteen trials. At least once, even when the answer was plain to see, nearly three-quarters of the students repeated the group’s wrong answer.

Sixty years later, scientists are discovering that there are deeper factors at work than even Asch could have imagined. New research using brain imaging studies suggests that there is a biological explanation for the variation in people’s ability to resist the temptation to conform. Neuroscientists monitoring brain images during conformity experiments similar to Asch’s have found that participants are not necessarily imitating the majority merely to fit in. Instead, participants’ visual perception seems to change to align with the answers of the rest of the group.

To understand how this change could take place, it’s helpful to know that the brain is an efficient organ that likes to cheat. In order to conserve energy, it takes shortcuts whenever possible, such as the reliance on labels explained earlier. Another shortcut is a concept known as the Law of Large Numbers, a probability theorem according to which, “the more measurements you make of something, the more accurate the average of these measurements becomes.” When the students in Asch’s experiment conformed to group opinion, their brains were taking the Law of Large Numbers shortcut, assuming that the opinion of the group was more statistically accurate than any individual’s. In 2005, neuroscientist Gregory Berns conducted a similar experiment, this time using MRIs to measure participants’ brain activity. Berns observed that deferring to the group took some of the pressure off the decision-making part of the brain.

Berns also noticed something else, as he wrote in his intriguing book Iconoclast: “We observed the fear system kicking in, almost like a fail-safe when the individual went against the group. These are powerful biological mechanisms that make it extremely difficult to think like an iconoclast.”

Berns saw increased activity in the amygdala when his test subjects did not conform to group opinion. Amygdala activity can lead to a rise in blood pressure and heart rate, sweating, and rapid breathing. “Its activation during nonconformity underscored the unpleasant nature of standing alone—even when the individual had no recollection of it,” Berns wrote. “In many people, the brain would rather avoid activating the fear system and just change perception to conform