“You just can’t fight “conformity” by indulging the evil pleasure of enjoying your conformity to a small tight-knit group of “non-conformists.” All this does is promote some groups at the expense of other groups, and poisons your mind in the process. It is like fighting “loyalty” by dogged devotion to an anti-loyalty alliance.”
IMO to be a true non-conformist, I would have to live alone isloated from all humanity, to do anything else would be conforming behavior.

Bill

You need to project massive confidence – much easier to do if you are overconfident (so you’d expect to find much more overconfidence in business ventures than in general). Even if you’re just projecting confidence, it does put you in a situation similar to the one you described: you are claiming certain beliefs, and the important thing is the content of the beliefs, not their truths.

Similar examples in auditors, tax inspectors, some scientific situations, and many institutionalised checks and balance: for the situation to work, people need to act as if they had certain beliefs (that this company is hiding something in their books, say) before knowing anything about their truth. A suspicious tax inspector would get better results than one whose beliefs are more accurate.

Anyway, not strictly relevant to your post, but relevant to the general thread behind it.

We rarely bother to show loyalty to humanity as a whole, because non-humans threaten little.

Why do you believe that’s the reason? Would you expect more sacrifice for the species as a whole at the expense of ourselves/in-groups if non-human life was a greater threat?

Summarized rather nicely in this recent paper as “self-organization proposes what natural selection disposes.”

How to balance the two antognist forces that shape individual social behaviour.

On the one hand, the necessity to be the one and only , different from the rest, and on the other hand, the necessity to be part of the group and be accepted.

I believe we just have to learn to live with it. Why some people are more conformists and other non-conformists and in between know something about it, would not lead us to predict social outrages, riots, revolutions…

Denis, yes I have first-hand experience.

Eric, if you actually have evidence for you odd views, you should expect to live among an institution that encourages authorities to review your evidence and then be convinced.

Talisman, Asch thought he found an encouraging amount of independent thinking among his subjects.

Stuart, I’m not convinced you need massive overconfidence in a business venture to make it work.

Gary, human nature is not infinitely flexible, but it does flex enough to make it worth searching for better ways of being human.