Conformity Excuses

From a distance it seems hard to explain a lot of human behavior without presuming that we humans have strong desires to conform to the behaviors of others. But when we look at our conscious thoughts and motivations regarding our specific behaviors, we find almost no conformity pressures. We are only rarely aware that we do anything, or avoid doing other things, because we want to conform.

The obvious explanation is that we make many excuses for our conformity – we make up other mostly-false explanations for why we like the same things that others like, and dislike other things. And since we do a lot of conforming, there must be a lot of bias here. So we can uncover and understand a lot of our biases if we can identify and understand these excuses. Here are a few possibilities that come to mind. I expect there are many others.

I picked my likes first, my group second. We like to point out that we are okay with liking many things that many others in the world don’t like. Yes, the people around us tend to like those same things, but that isn’t us conforming to those social neighbors, because we picked the things we like first, and then picked those people around us as a consequence. Or so we say. But we conform far more to our neighbors than can plausibly be explained by our limited selection power.

I just couldn’t be happy elsewhere. We tend to tell ourselves that we couldn’t be happy in a different profession, city, or culture, in part to excuse our reluctance to deviate from the standard practices of such things. We’d actually adjust fine to much larger moves than we are willing to consider.

I actually like small differences. We notice that we don’t like to come to a party in the exact same dress as someone else. We also want different home decorations and garden layouts, and we don’t want to be reading the exact same book as everyone else at the moment. We then extrapolate and think we don’t mind being arbitrarily different.

In future, this will be more popular. We are often okay with doing something different today because we imagine that it will become much more popular later. Then we can be celebrated for being one of the first to like it. If we were sure that few would ever like it, we’d be much less willing to like it now.

Second tier folks aren’t remotely as good. While we personally can tell the difference between someone who is very bad and someone who is very good, we usually just don’t have the discernment to tell the difference in quality between the most popular folks and second tier folks who are much less popular. But we tell ourselves that we can tell the difference, to justify our strong emphasis on those most popular folks.

Unpopular things are objectively defective. We probably make many specific excuses about unpopular things, to justify our neglect of them.