Should you or should you not trust your brain…

Think of a time you conformed to peer pressure. You probably gave in to what the group wanted because you wanted to fit in. Does that sound about right?

Well, that’s an illusion. In fact, your behaviour wasn’t caused by what you thought about yourself – but rather what you thought they thought about themselves.

The problem with conformity isn’t so much that we feel pressured to be like everyone else. In fact, there are biological functions that make us the most socially advanced species on the planet – and it’s all for our survival, which is a good thing. No, the problem is actually with how we perceive the group.

This content is all about expanding the way you view your social groups, how you behave in response to your perception, and how you can turn everything around simply by dissenting. In essence, it’s about deviating from the norms that are hurting our society so you can create a cascading influence of positive change. The best part? It’s so easy a child could do it.

 You can’t always trust your brain.

You might know this story. It’s about an emperor and two con men posing as weavers. The men convince the emperor they’ve created the most magnificent clothes that only the elite can see. The clothes are invisible to people who are dumb or ignorant. So the emperor wears his “invisible” clothes out into the public square, parading naked before his subjects, all of whom are silently questioning what they’re seeing. Am I too stupid or low-class to see the clothes? Is it possible the emperor isn’t actually wearing anything? Just then, a young boy jumps out and says, “Hey! He’s naked!” And just like that, the illusion crumbles, and one by one, the emperor’s people feel free to admit what they’ve known all along.

If you’d been one of the people in the crowd, you’d have fallen victim to a collective illusion. It started when a person perceived to know more than you told a lie and you believed them – that’s called prestige bias. It continued when you remained silent in spite of your own qualms, giving confirmation to those around you that the emperor was indeed wearing clothes. And it ended when someone bravely spoke the truth.

This isn’t the only way collective illusions form but it’s the perfect example. It’s also lighthearted and fictional.

So here’s a real-life example. In the United States, 5,000 people die each year waiting for a kidney transplant. Over 3,500 kidneys are thrown away each year, and it’s estimated that 50 percent of those are healthy transplantable kidneys.

Why would we throw away perfectly healthy kidneys? When patients are offered a kidney, they have the option to reject it. The first person may have a valid reason for rejecting a kidney that has nothing to do with the quality of the organ. The second person may or may not know why the first person rejected it.

But any rejection after that is because the longer a kidney is on the waitlist, the lower its perceived value. In short, the primary reason for rejecting the kidney is this: it’s been rejected so many times before there must be something wrong with it.

This copycat reasoning is just one form of conformity trap. It’s your brain’s way of filling in information gaps with logical, if sometimes harmful, assumptions. If others rejected it, in the absence of any other knowledge, you assume it’s bad.

In this scenario, you don’t trust your own personal judgment over that of the group. There are some sound survival reasons for this brain adaptation – think about what you’d do if you were playing in the ocean and all of the tourists suddenly started running out of the water. It would probably be a good idea for you to run as well.

However, this behavior can also lead to you missing out on a perfectly healthy kidney transplant, standing in a line that leads to nowhere, pretending to like a movie you hated, or otherwise perpetrating a collective illusion.

And as with the kidney example, these illusions can be extremely destructive. Now, let’s talk about how we help create and perpetuate collective illusions.

It’s easier to lie.

Your brain is programmed to punish you when you deviate from the group. Humans are pack animals of the highest order and our species is trending to lean more and more heavily on this adaptation. Cooperation, collaboration, and looking out for each other are all ways we’re advancing in our technology and quality of life. 

To speak out against the group makes us feel vulnerable. Even if we do speak up, when the crowd stands against us, we’re likely to retreat into silence. We’re silent in the presence of authority. We’re silent out of the false perception of being in the minority. We’re silent when we have important desires at stake – like job promotions or grades.

But silence is consensus, and consensus perpetrates collective illusions. So how do we live with ourselves when we sacrifice our own beliefs to conform to the group?

Quite easily, in some ways. Your body is rewarded with oxytocin – the hugging hormone – whenever you achieve the group’s approval or prioritize its interests. Your personal identity is intricately connected to your social identity, which is part of the reason being in sync with the group makes you feel so good.

Even more powerful than your desire to belong is your fear of being cast out. In fact, your brain is so sensitive to the fear of being put out of the group that it doesn’t differentiate between groups. It could be a group of friends or a group of enemies. If your brain senses you’re about to be ostracized, it will send out fear hormones designed to incite you to react.

One of the things we all do to conform is lie – to the group and to ourselves – about what we believe or agree with in order to fit in. At this point, our personal and social identities are at odds. This creates cognitive dissonance, and that’s a state that is unsustainable. We have to do something to reconnect our beliefs with our outward actions.

Turns out, we do one of three things. We either challenge the group, decide to leave, or surrender. Most often, we surrender, which means either justifying our behavior or falsifying our beliefs.

The unfortunate fact is, even though you’ve eased that cognitive dissonance by conforming, you’ve lost something important. You’ve lost the unique, sincere traits, ideas, and beliefs that you need to be happy and that can truly make an impact on the world.

How you do or don’t conform matters. Here’s why.

We are neurological chameleons.

Neurobiology has discovered that humans are capable of continuously shifting and modifying their belief systems in order to maintain their standing within the group. The brain science behind this lies in the study of something called mirror neurons.

If you’ve ever seen a baby watch your hands or feet move and then seen their hands or feet involuntarily move in response – that’s due to mirror neurons. They’re the nerve cells that fire when the person acts or observes.

But these cells are also responsible for helping create an empathetic connection. Understanding starts with mimicry and advances to the point of predicting behavior. It’s almost like we can’t help but conform. In fact, mirror neurons cause us to copy someone else even when we have no reason to. Have you ever caught yourself smiling in response to someone else’s smile?

So maybe conformity isn’t so bad. Maybe it serves a purpose.

As with anything, this is partially true. We’re happier, healthier people when we’re connected to our group. But only when we’re also able to be true to ourselves within that connection. Thinking a few steps ahead, you can probably see where conflict originates – at the moment when your truth conflicts with someone else’s.

While conformity within a group already presents its challenges, we’ve also compounded the problem by creating even more groups of people we never even meet in real life. These online communities do offer some benefits, but they’re plagued with pitfalls.

For one thing, groupthink can be swayed by bots. One study showed that only 5–10 percent of the community members need to be bots to gain a full majority collective illusion.

The worst part is, you’re susceptible to acting on your perception of what the group believes rather than what it actually believes. And this is the very root of racism, political division, and even wars. Our conformity can literally destroy the world.

One more point about conformity before we solve this issue.

Changing norms is difficult.

Bad language, table etiquette, and holding open doors are all norms that have no intrinsic value. They’re completely arbitrary. They were created by some elite individual too long ago for us to even care anymore. And yet, they’re not going away.

Here’s why this is a problem. Over 100 years ago, a man named Frederick Winslow Taylor – who apparently strongly disliked workers – created a book called The Principles of Scientific Management. In a perfect example of the pen being mightier than the sword, he forever shaped the way business is done.

Taylor’s book created a divide between managers and workers. It told managers that workers weren’t to be trusted and destroyed the concept that workers were able to manage their own time. If you’re being required to sit in a cubicle and twiddle your thumbs at work today, you have Taylor to thank.

The distrust between management and workers has persisted and worsened over the decades. As a society, Americans are deeply distrustful of each other, resulting in political and religious divides when, in fact, studies show that most Americans actually hold the same values. Studies also show that most Americans are worthy of trust.

The distrust bias is probably the most insidious collective illusion today, tearing families apart, leading to riots, and in some cases all-out wars.

The fact is, there’s no reason for us to continue this way. Not when we have so much understanding of the brain and so much data to disprove our biases and illusions.

So what’s the solution?

A congruent life is key.

The opposite of cognitive dissonance is congruency. When our beliefs and actions are aligned and we’re able to continue belonging to the group, we’re living a congruent life.

But as we’ve already mentioned, conflict happens when your truth clashes with someone else’s or with the group’s. The key is not to fear this dissonance, but rather to learn a healthy way to understand it.

You can be true to yourself while in disagreement with the group. The key is to differentiate between attitude and content. The content of your beliefs needs to remain firmly in your court. Those are yours to own. Likewise, the group or individual you’re disagreeing with has the right to their own content.

Communal growth and connection happen when we share an attitude. Respectful discourse and disagreement should always be allowed, and if no consensus can be reached, the relationship should still remain intact.

We won’t get into conflict management here, but it’s important to know that healthy conflict is rooted in love for the group and respect for the individual. And that can only occur on a large scale when we change our relationship with trust.

Trust begets trust.

As mentioned earlier, distrust bias is a big problem – particularly in the United States. Taylor’s management book is an example of a movement toward basing systems on the fundamental distrust of other people. This is a form of paternalism, the practice of people in authority restricting or managing the freedom of subordinates.

Paternalism has been practiced by the US government on many groups of people in some truly abhorrent ways. It’s a collective illusion that absolutely must be dismantled, and, in some isolated places, it is.

For example, Halden prison in Norway seeks to genuinely offer rehabilitation to prisoners rather than punishment. Their rooms are like dorms. They have jobs and freedom of movement. Norway has reduced its recidivism rate to 20 percent compared with 70 percent in the US.

Trust on the scale of schools, workplaces, and governments, is hard to come by. But, of course, it starts with you – the little boy who called out the naked emperor.

One more study to help you take down the distrust bias. In 2019, a study in Science magazine gave a “lost wallet” to participants in more than 350 cities. The wallets had various amounts of cash and valuables in them. It turned out that not only did people try to return the wallets, but the higher the value inside, the harder they tried.

Trusting people is activism, and it can create a positive cascading effect that saves us from ourselves. It starts with you and your interactions with those around you. Recognize the illusions and dissent. Be a deviant – in a good way.

We’re hardwired to conform. Our brains are trying to protect us and advance us, but sometimes they get in the way. Our conformity can cause us to perpetuate harmful collective illusions that range in severity from humorous to catastrophic on a global scale.

To combat collective illusions, we have to change the way we approach our personal and social identities. We have to learn to belong to the group without losing our individuality. We have to learn to trust. And we have to learn to dissent.

Got feedback?

I’d  love to hear what you think about this content! Just drop an email to ayansur1986@gmail.com with the title of this content as the subject line and share your thoughts or you may reach out to me on my LinkedIn directly (Ayan enigmatic Bloke Sur).

Let’s Read, Learn and Grow Together!!!