Bruce Hood - The Domesticated Brain - A Pelican Introduction (Pelican Books)

We are remarkably susceptible to the power of others when it comes to conformity. A classic set of studies by American psychologist Solomon Asch in the 1950s demonstrated that individuals were also prepared to deny seeing something with their own eyes if there were enough people in the room to say otherwise. 40He set up a situation where a real participant was part of a group with seven other confederates who were in on the true purpose of the experiment. They were told that it was a study of perception and that they had to match the length of a test line to one of three other lines. The experimenter held up a card and then went around the room, asking each person to answer aloud in turn. The real participant was among the last to be called on. The task was trivially easy. Everything was normal on the first two trials, but on the third trial, something odd happened. The confederates all began giving the same wrong answer. What did the real participant do? Results showed that three out of four of them conformed and gave the wrong answer on at least one trial.

For many decades, this research was interpreted as evidence that we comply with the group consensus. People merely said something they did not believe in order to gain social approval. It only took the presence of one other person who disagreed with the answer for the real participant to stick to their guns and give the correct answer. However, this finding has been undermined by many studies that show that even when responses are anonymous, people still go with the flow. 41

One remarkable possibility is that people’s perceptions are indeed changed by the group consensus. To get at the difference between public compliance and private acceptance, you can look at brain activation. In a recent brain-imaging study, 42men were asked to rate photographs of 180 women for attractiveness. They were then placed in an fMRI scanner and asked to rate all the faces again, but this time they were provided with information about how each one had been rated by a group of peers. In fact, the group ratings were random. If the group said ‘hot’ but the participant had originally rated ‘not’, the participant shifted his rating higher and there was an increase in activation in two areas associated with evaluating rewards, the nucleus accumbens and the orbitofrontal cortex. Both areas light up when viewing sexually attractive faces. 43When the group rated a face that the participant had originally thought beautiful as less attractive, there was a corresponding downward shift in his rating and brain activity.

We are so keen to fit in with the group that our behaviour can be easily manipulated. You may have noticed this with the signs and messages left for guests appearing in some of the hotels you stay at. When a Holiday Inn in Tempe, Arizona, left a variety of different message cards in their guests’ bathrooms in the hopes of convincing those guests to re-use their towels rather than having them laundered every day, they discovered that the single most effective message was the one that simply read: ‘Seventy-five percent of our guests use their towels more than once.’ 44This technique has recently become used to nudge people into making economic decisions that previously were imposed by the state, often raising a degree of resentment. Authorities can more easily persuade people by nudging them rather than threatening them, as a better way of influencing their behaviour. 45When a pension fund sends out a letter saying, ‘Most people are willing to invest a proportion of their earnings towards their pension …’, the fund’s managers are relying on our herd mentality to conform with the group rather than threatening us, which is less effective.

Hypocrites in the brain

How does conformity work? One answer is that when we are conforming we are avoiding the experience of discordance in our brains. It has long been known that humans need to justify their thoughts and actions; especially when they behave hypocritically. For example, if we expend a lot of effort to attain a goal to no avail, rather than accept that we have failed, we are more inclined to reframe the episode in a positive light such as ‘I didn’t really want that job’ or ‘That relationship was never going to work out’. We would rather re-evaluate the goals as negative so that we avoid discord. Aesop wrote about such ‘sour grapes’ in his fables as when the fox abandoned the grapes that were out of reach, dismissing them as probably inedible anyway. The reason we justify our actions is because of cognitive dissonance – the unpleasant state that arises when a person recognizes inconsistency in his or her own actions, attitudes, or beliefs. In the same way that we generally prefer truth over lies, we like to believe that we are true to ourselves. 46

This belief means that we will frequently be disappointed in ourselves. All too often in life, we let ourselves down, which presents us with a state of dissonance – when things do not match up to our expectations. None of us is a saint – we are all flawed to a lesser or greater extent. We may cheat, lie, deceive, be economical with the truth, slack on the job, contribute less, fail to help, be hurtful, cruel or misbehave in other ways. We are often hypocritical – congratulating others through gritted teeth when we would have preferred to win the competition.

These flaws stand in direct contrast to the positive attributes we believe we possess – trustworthiness, kindness, helpfulness and generally being a good person. Very few of us are full of self-loathing or un-hypocritical. That is why there is a dissonance. Presented with the evidence of our wrongdoing, we may realize there is a contradiction. When people experience the unpleasant state of cognitive dissonance, they naturally try to alleviate it. This can be achieved by revising one’s actions, attitudes or beliefs in order to restore consistency among them. So we say, ‘They had it coming’, ‘I didn’t like them in the first place anyway’, or ‘I always knew that they were a bad egg’ – anything to reframe the situation so that whatever negative thing we have done becomes justified as a reasonable way to behave.

In one fMRI study of cognitive dissonance, 47participants were scanned while they entertained the contradictory notion that the uncomfortable scanner environment was actually a pleasant experience. They were told that after forty-five minutes in the scanner they would be asked to rate the experience by answering questions. Half were asked to say that they actually enjoyed the experience in order to reassure a nervous participant who was waiting outside to do the study. The other half was a control group who were told that they would receive $1 each time they answered questions by saying that they enjoyed the experience. Imaging revealed that two regions were more active in the participants who had to endure the cognitive dissonance condition. These were the ACC, which detects conflicts in our thoughts and action, and the anterior insula, which registers negative emotional experiences – the same two regions that lit up during the study measuring what happens when we have to disagree with others. Not only were the ACC and the insular regions activated, but on a follow-up set of questions when there was no need to lie, the participants in the cognitive dissonance condition also rated the experience as more pleasant than the group who were paid, proving that they had indeed experienced a shift in their evaluation of the experience. In other words, they had convinced themselves that it was not such a bad experience, whereas the ones who had been paid knew they were lying for cash.

Cognitive dissonance is something that persuaders can so easily exploit. Imagine someone pushes in front of you in a queue to use a photocopier. Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer 48found that six out of ten would not object if the person said, ‘Excuse me, I only have five pages, can I use the photocopier?’ Even when the apology is not intended, more than half still let the queue-jumper in front. Why is that? For one reason, most people want to avoid conflict and so do not confront the individual. They may be annoyed but not to the extent that it is worth doing something about it. Very often under these sorts of situations we will rationalize our response by reasoning that our own inconvenience is minor and thus not worth the effort. As soon as the person gives a reason such as ‘Excuse me, I only have five pages, can I use the photocopier because I am in a rush?’, nine out of ten do not object. By providing a reason, they have made it easier for the people waiting patiently in the queue to justify their decision to acquiesce.