Conformity
The Herd Mentality
Human beings have, either by inherent design, or by development through environmental conditions, developed a strong tendency to conform to others and especially groups, likely as a tool for survival. The problem with this is that people unwittingly place themselves in dangerous situations more often than not due to their urge to be alike to others in their environment.
People are willing to surrender to the group in the effort to have an accurate perception of reality and to be accepted by other people. They will surrender their own truths for those of the group, likely subconsciously, so as to increase their likeability in that group and to correctly identify the parameters of achieving success in this reality, which they cannot know unless they have had personal experience. Even if they have had success, they may yet be willing to adapt to an unsuccessful group norm if they believe it may be better in achieving any number of goals, both tangible and abstract.
Meaning, that if some double-masked bubble-wrap wearing covidiot is shouting at you about wearing a mask, you likely are encountering a person who has adapted their worldview to the parameters for success laid out by government agencies, multinational corporations, and globalist institutions as a survival mechanism that is as simple as, trust authority. That person is likely to have been affirmed in their compliance and acceptance in that others who also trust authority present them with an ever-deepening entanglement in the group norm, even if confronted with absolute, incontrovertible evidence of their delusion. Since much of the population wants to appear compassionate while ignoring the suffering in their backyard, anti-war, while cheerleading Ukrainian Nazi’s, and pro-bodily autonomy, while demanding the government force vaccinate the 120 million-ish unvaccinated Americans, it makes me curious as to whether these covidiot corporation patriots have surrendered their minds in the form of acceptance, or are simply complying to get by and fit in.
The Asch Conformity Experiment, Sherif’s Autokinetic effect experiments, and the Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment and the most well-known experiments done on conformity. They show that at least 75% of the population is extraordinarily manipulatable as they will conform to what they perceive as social norms and even disregard the truth of their own eyes and ears to be accepted into a group or the groups way of thinking.
Types of Conformity
There is public and private conformity. Public conformity is called Compliance and refers to a behavioral change to align with a group norm. Private conformity is called Acceptance and refers to a change of opinion or thought around a subject to align with a group norm. There is also Anti-Conformity, wherein a person who disagreed with a group becomes even more aggressively opposed to the groups norm after being exposed to pressure. I consider this to be a type of conformity rather than nonconformity because it falls into the same mechanism of being a slave to the group norm, whether in conforming or not conforming, and thus conforming. Either way, it is an easily manipulatable position.
Deindividuation: This is a state when you become so immersed in the norms of the group that you lose your sense of identity and personal responsibility.
Learned Helplessness: When you become submissive to a situation because you learn that whatever you do has little to no effect on what happens to you. The more random the situation presents to you, the more helpless you become, as you are unable to identify a routine or pattern to normalize.
Then there is nonconformity. Independence occurs when a man disagreed with a group and does not conform or anti-conform, does not exhibit compliance or acceptance after being exposed to group pressure. This can also be called a free man. A self-determined man. An independent, clear, and self-confident man.
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Recent innovative work in applied psychology has established that making people aware of the behavior of others is a useful technique for inducing positive behavioral change on a societal level. For example, taxpayers are more likely to pay what they owe when knowing that others do (Coleman, 2007; Cabinet Office UK Behavioural Insights Team, 2012), householders decrease their energy use when informed that they use more power than their neighbors (Schultz et al., 2007; Slemrod and Allcott, 2011), and people are more likely to give to a charity if it is viewed as the social norm (Alpizar et al., 2008; Smith et al., 2015). Many of these strategies have been successfully applied in recent years, albeit on a somewhat ad hoc basis. However, a better understanding of the mechanisms of social influence and conformity, both cognitively and neurally, is important in extending these techniques into other domains of interest to policy-makers.
Over the course of the last decade, a growing body of work has examined the neurocognitive correlates of social influence (for reviews see Falk et al., 2012; Morgan and Laland, 2012; Izuma, 2013; Schnuerch and Gibbons, 2014; Cascio et al., 2015). These studies have focused on diverse aspects of social influence, ranging from how the opinion of others affects the valuation and perception of simple stimuli (Berns et al., 2005; Mason et al., 2009; Chen et al., 2012; Stallen et al., 2013; Tomlin et al., 2013; Trautmann-Lengsfeld and Herrmann, 2013) to more complex, realistic, choice options (Klucharev et al., 2009; Berns et al., 2010; Campbell-Meiklejohn et al., 2010; Zaki et al., 2011; Huber et al., 2015), and finally, to what brain mechanisms underlie long-term conformity, how the mere presence of peers impacts brain activity and leads to changes in risk-taking and trust decisions (Steinberg, 2007; Chein et al., 2011; Fareri et al., 2012, 2015), and how the brain reconciles misleading influence (Edelson et al., 2011, 2014; Izuma, 2013). The goal of this Focused Review is not to re-summarize this work, but rather to explore to what extent these neuroimaging studies can contribute to our understanding of the psychology of social influence, and what promising directions lie ahead in the future. Specifically, while social influence is a broad term describing the impact of others on our behavior and opinions, we here focus on studies on conformity, with conformity referring to the actual alignment of people's opinions or behaviors with those of others. This review is structured around three ways in which neuroimaging has been suggested to contribute to psychology (Moran and Zaki, 2013), namely the role of neuroimaging in (i) identifying the fundamental mechanisms that underlie behavior, (ii) dissociating between psychological theories that make similar behavioral predictions, and (iii) using brain activity to predict subsequent behavioral change.
A growing number of neuroscientific studies suggest that conformity recruits neural signals that are similar to those involved in reinforcement learning (Klucharev et al., 2009; Campbell-Meiklejohn et al., 2010; Kim et al., 2012; Shestakova et al., 2013). For example, in the study by Klucharev et al. (2009), participants were asked to rate female faces and then saw the purported aggregate judgments of other raters. Upon seeing those faces a second time, participants' ratings were shown to shift in the direction of the group judgments. Neuroimaging results demonstrated that when individual ratings differed from those of the group, activity in the rostral cingulate zone, an area in the medial prefrontal cortex and involved in the processing of conflict (Ridderinkhof et al., 2004), increased, while activity in the nucleus accumbens, an area associated with the expectation of reward (Knutson et al., 2005), decreased. Interestingly, the amplitude of these signals predicted conformity, such that when this incongruence was large (although exactly what magnitude this discrepancy should be to trigger conformity is still undetermined), people then adjusted their behavior and aligned their opinion with that of the group (Klucharev et al., 2009). Similar neural discrepancy signals reflecting the deviation of one's own assessment and a salient external opinion have been reported by other studies as well (Campbell-Meiklejohn et al., 2010; Deuker et al., 2013; Izuma and Adolphs, 2013; Lohrenz et al., 2013).
KEY CONCEPT 3. Reinforcement learning
Reinforcement learning is learning about the environment by trial and error. By encountering positive and negative outcomes, individuals learn over time what action to select to maximize reward. In conformity research, acceptance by the group is typically seen as the reward and matching one's attitude, opinion or behavior with those of others as the means to achieve this outcome.
KEY CONCEPT 4. Compliance
Compliance refers to a superficial form of conformity when individuals express the same opinion or behavior as the group but do not change their actual underlying attitude or belief. Compliance is also known as public conformity and is the opposite of private conformity, or internalization, when people truly believe the group is right and actual preference change occurs.
It is both interesting and enlightening to see the authors of this article in frontiers present their argument in the fashion of correcting behavior that is opposed to obedience to government and centralized authority. They indicate that corrections on a societal level can be made regarding paying taxes. More than this, the idea that some body of people will use social manipulation tactics, akin to those used by governments and corporations, and created by globalist organizations like the Tavistock Institute (here) (here) to intentionally indoctrinate the population, and that they are seemingly self-justified in doing so, must be extremely unsettling to any reasonable and rational man.
Behaviorism, Eugenics, Technocracy, and all the other social design methodologies are actively being pursued by the globalist parasites and have been for a very long time.
Mirror Neurons and Conformity
Mirror neuron system is a group of specialized neurons that “mirrors” the actions and behaviour of others. The involvement of mirror neuron system (MNS) is implicated in neurocognitive functions (social cognition, language, empathy, theory of mind) and neuropsychiatric disorders. MNS discovery is considered to be the most important landmark in neuroscience research during the last decade.
The Bystander Effect
The bystander effect—in which the presence of others discourages individuals from intervening in a situation—is likely influenced, in part, by conformity: If we see others choosing to do nothing, we’re more likely to do nothing ourselves. Diffusion of responsibility—in which no individual feels like it’s up to them to intervene—may also partially motivate the effect. The more bystanders there are the less likely any of them are to intervene. This effect is apparent not just during a public assault, but when we look at political corruption, globalism, war and genocide, and all the ills of human existence. When there are 340 million Americans, why should any one of them feel compelled or motivated to take action. They experience the diffusion of responsibility, or, the lack of seeing that it is their responsibility to take action when others are not. This also applies to Conformity then, as it is due to, at least in part, the inaction of the group, that the individual does not take action. If even one of the group did take action, each individual would be far more likely to do the same. As the wave of people taking action increased, eventually, nearly all would have taken action.
How does Conformity Apply to our Self-Image vs the Image of Others?
If the social/group norm is that we pay our taxes, and due to this we are good people, then anyone who chooses to not pay their taxes becomes a bad person. This relative way of thinking is really the only way groups can think cohesively, at least in the societies of today, where we have been dumbed down. So, if you are part of a faction/society/group that wants to have open borders, and you tie into that idea the quality of your compassion, the goodness of your soul, and your greater intellect, then all who disagree with your faction/society/group will automatically be cruel, apathetic, evil, and stupid. If a different faction/society/group holds that open borders should never be allowed, then you must be pitted against each other in every way. They become the enemy. Group of slaves against group of slaves. Republicans vs Democrats, with Independents and Libertarians and Green Party and Social Democrats all running around the two shouting, but never really heard or cared about.
If you tie your self-image into the group norm, then you abandon your own will for the will of the group. When other groups/factions exist that have contrary norms to your group, you become more tied into your own group as a means for survival. You become more entrenched in your groups norms and may even centralize yourself in them. The weaker the person, the greater the likelihood of their need to envelope themselves in the group norms, to avoid having to see themselves as they truly are.
The greater self-awareness and self-confidence of the individual, the less likely they will be content amidst any group norms. They will recognize the limitations of those, the unthinking herds acceptance and compliance, and will prefer solitude or small groups of similarly capable individuals.
“The better you are at surrounding yourself with people of high potential, the greater your chance for success.”
~ John C. Maxwell
Just as with the Stanford Prison Experiment, people behave according to social norms and roles. The moment someone becomes a prison guard or a cop, they immediately begin to behave like the social icon of the police officer. What is a cop to the average person? How do they behave? How are they supposed to behave? What is a school teacher? How are they supposed to behave? A politician? A Lawyer? Then add to this role and norm behavior the affirmations everyone is receiving from their peer group through mirror neurons and compliance and finally acceptance. Whether it is logical, sensible or true, it doesn’t matter when one’s society deems it to be so.
This feature of social norms – their embeddedness in the dynamics of peer groups – begins to delimit the rights-relevant behaviors that norms can illuminate. For example, social norms might shape the interrogation practices used by a police force: Police officers use the behavior of their peers as a guide to what constitutes an appropriate level of force. Similarly, 5 social norms might influence the level of education girls receive in a community: Parents use the behavior of other parents as a guide. Social norms can explain uniformities of behavior among employees within corporations and among corporations within industries. They can also explain why groups differ – why some police forces use more aggressive interrogation tactics than others, some communities treat girls better than others, and some corporations and industries treat workers better than others.
Reflections on Social Norms and Human Rights (princeton.edu)
During the Scamdemic Lockdowns, with everybody wearing masks, the ability for our young children to develop correctly, with fully functioning minds, was intentionally and actively retarded. To a young child, the reading of faces is directly linked to their ability to understand their society, their environment and themselves. A key factor of what is identified as autism is a lack of mirror neuron activity. This makes them less empathetic, and less able to convey and receive understanding from gestural communication which is by far the dominant communication happening between humans, and I would say all of life. Masks prevented our youth from gaining the appropriate experience to fully understand social interaction.
“We find that children born during the pandemic have significantly reduced verbal, motor, and overall cognitive performance compared to children born pre-pandemic. Moreover, we find that males and children in lower socioeconomic families have been most affected.”
-Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Early Child Cognitive Development: Initial Findings in a Longitudinal Observational Study of Child Health (medrxiv.org)
The discovery of mirror neurons provided strong support for the gestural theory of speech etymology. Mirror neurons create a direct link between the sender of a message and its receiver. Thanks to the mirror mechanism, actions done by one individual become messages that are understood by an observer without any cognitive mediation. The observation of an individual grasping an apple is immediately understood because it evokes the same motor representation in the parieto-frontal mirror system of the observer. On the basis of this fundamental property of mirror neurons and the fact that the observation of actions like hand grasping activates the caudal part of IFG (Broca's area), neuroscientists proposed that the mirror mechanism is the basic mechanism from which language evolved.
-Rizzolatti G, Arbib MA. Language within our grasp. Trends Neurosci. 1998;21:188–94.
Is there any positive aspect of Conformity?
Of course there is. The whole basis for human communication, organization and maturation is built upon conformity. It is the balance of conformity, especially in youth, with principles, logic, self-awareness, self-confidence, and responsibility and accountability, as one ages, that has been lost to much of the world. A healthy man would be able to recognize similarities between his perspective and that of a group and join that group to investigate the depth of those similarities and potentially actively pursue goals together. He would not tie his identity into that group, but would rather add the group to his own identity, controlling his role and his investment. If the group became opposed or different than his perspective, he would choose to leave the group, after perhaps considering the value and virtue of the different perspectives brought by the group/faction/society.
At all times, the confident man will meet the world in front of him, rather than the one that exists through the filters of others, whether they be groups or individuals. He makes his way through the world by accumulating direct experience that lends wisdom to his future. He needs not a single other human to inform him of the quality of his own mind, but he is open to receiving information and new ideas that he may or may not take into consideration for his own life. He speaks with forthrightness and integrity and honesty. He does not mirror others absentmindedly, because he remains mindful. He remains vigilant so as to always harness his awareness in every moment. By doing so, he is not often a victim of manipulation, and he is not easily misled. His mind and body are his Kingdom, and he does not surrender or give access to his halls without investigating everything that presents itself at his gate with keen and comprehensive attention and diligence.
And just in case… for the small minds that may have made it this far.
Nonconformity does not mean doing what other “nonconformists” are doing. That is just conforming to an alternative faction/society/group. True nonconformity is synonymous, or equal to, a completely sovereign state of mind. It is one where you choose what you do and think based on what is inherently right to and for you. You can conform out of attachment or you invest and get involved in a society out of Love, interest, principle, or any other value you apply to it. But that is the trick, you choose. First inside of yourself, then outside of yourself. Just how honest to yourself are you going to be, and just how honest you will be with the world.
When do hero’s conform?
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