Recently, over on Daily Kos, I reposted a piece I wrote in December of 2007 about Asch’s work on conformity, and that post provides the framework for today’s personal stories about conformity.
To recap (with more details in the previous post), in the figure shown here, when asked which line most matches the one on the card, many people were influenced to choose the incorrect answer, even when they were sure that C was correct, through the influence of others choosing the same incorrect answer.
I understood this research long before I read about it, even though I had neither the words nor expertise to explain it. When I was a kid, I used to try social experiments in movie theaters. I would, for example, see if I could get other people to applaud when I applauded. It turns out I could. Much of the time, it only took one or two other people to go along and then the whole theater was doing it.
My favorite though, was getting people to laugh.
This particular trick worked best in comedies that had lots of dramatic moments in them, or dramas which had many funny bits. This is what you do: make a point of laughing loudly (but not in a fake over the top “I’m acting like someone having fun!” way) at a point in the film where there is nothing funny going on, but after someone has just said something.
It is common for someone else in the audience to think they’ve missed a good joke and start laughing as well. In a matter of seconds, you can have an entire theater laughing at something that is not even remotely funny.
There is an anecdote about Vladamir Horowitz in this regard. It may be just a story, and it may be true, but it illustrates the point. Carnegie Hall, the story goes, has people hired to applaud at key points. These are people who know when the pieces begin and end and when it’s appropriate to applaud. Classical musicians can be a stuffy lot, and they do not appreciate it when people applaud between movements but before the piece has finished. The clappers, therefore, provide an informational service, allowing the audience to know when the piece is over and giving them permission to clap.
Horowitz didn’t think this was necessary. He insisted that there were enough people in the audience that knew classical music that they’d clap when appropriate and the rest of the audience would follow.
Horowitz was, of course, wrong. He completely bombed at Carnegie Hall.
Which brings us to the story of Joshua Bell’s rush hour violin performance. Read the article in full– it’s well worth reading, and I don’t want to try to rehash it because doing so would not do it real justice. It does, however, serve as background for what I’m going to say below.
The short version is that there’s a certain sense of consensus to Bell’s popularity. Does his music shine through and ring true throughout, regardless of circumstance? Do people stop and listen to him because he’s a brilliant musician, or do we stop to listen because, socially, enough people have determined that he’s a brilliant musician that we conform to the idea that he’s brilliant once enough people tell us so?
Mind you: I’m not speaking to the accuracy of the claim of brilliance on Bell’s part. I’m talking about the perception of it and how that perception comes to exist.
Think about the “popularity” of such people as Paris Hilton. She’s not famous for anything she’s said or done. She’s actually a recursive celebrity: she’s famous for being famous, and then people know who she is because other people know who she is.
I’m talking about all this because I think that knowing how conformity works is something we can use to our advantage. How often do we find the media making claims about what “people” think? This can create self-fulfilling prophesies, convincing some of us that we’re not conforming. It doesn’t take a lot of people to swing an election; if you can convince just 10% of the population to conform to a specific idea against their better judgment, you can swing an election.
If you can, as was done in the 1980’s, convince the public that people think of “liberal” as a dirty word and that “card carrying member of the ACLU” is a good attack on a political opponent, you can swing an election.
And if liberals and card-carrying members of the ACLU try to hide from those labels, they behave in a fashion which convinces the public that there’s something to be ashamed of there.
Twenty years ago, I met William Sloane Coffin. I will never forget one specific thing he said– when Dukakis was being accused using that exact term: “a card carrying member of the ACLU,” Coffin said that it was bad for him to try to shy away from that, that the proper response was “damned right I am. And here’s my card.” Coffin understood conformity and knew that when politicians act as though they are not part of the mainstream, they lose voters. He was right.
We don’t have to be the majority, but even when we are the majority, we too often act as though we’re not. We pretend deference to Republicans whom we soundly rejected in the last election. We behave as though we owe them something because so many voters supported them.
We need to stop this. We need to do what needs to be done, do the right things as they come up and just act as though everyone supports us, even when they do. Until Democrats can learn that lesson, we’re going to be allowing Republicans to take too much control of the agenda. Politics doesn’t need to be about party, but it does need to be about doing what’s right, and it’s pretty clear in the coming months what we need to do. Step one is to stop pretending that Republicans have or deserve power. The more we act as though they have power, the more people believe them to have power, and the more power they get. The more we act as though they are irrelevant, the more people begin to believe it.
We need to make their irrelevancy manifest, and we need to do it now.
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