The Brain Science of Conformity

Why are we so quick to follow along when people around us embrace a falsehood? Because of the anxiety, unease and disgust caused by standing apart

The Brain Science of Conformity
Illustration: Tomasz Walenta

We’ve all seen people agree with something false because everyone around them is doing the same. It’s a problem in schoolyards, board rooms and, especially lately, in politics, where social media has proven a powerful tool for rallying people to untruths.

Psychologists have long studied this sort of conformity. In classic research begun in the 1950s by Solomon Asch, solitary subjects would be asked something with an obvious answer, such as, “Here’s a line. Which of these three other lines is it closest to in length?”

Then a subject would be asked the same question while amid a group of others planted by the researchers. The other “participants” would state their choices first—and unanimously pick a glaringly wrong answer. Stunningly, the real study subjects would agree with that incorrect answer up to three-quarters of the time.

Neuroscientists soon started studying the brains of subjects conforming in such a way. The discovery that everyone disagrees with you turns out to typically activate the amygdala and the insular cortex, brain regions associated with anxiety, disgust and unease. It can also activate regions associated with reinforcement learning and error correction.

This suggests that when we stand apart from a group this way, we don’t just feel different and exposed but distressingly wrong. The more these brain regions were activated, the more likely someone was to seek relief and conform.

Scientists have identified two modes of conforming. In “public conformity,” subjects change their answers merely to be agreeable, reverting back to their original view in private. “Private conformity” occurs when individuals embrace the crowd’s flagrantly wrong answer as their own, even when alone. An important study by Micah Edelson of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and colleagues, published in 2014 in Neuropsychopharmacology, highlights key differences between these two types.

In their experiment, the subjects—92 adult male volunteers with a mean age of 27—watched a documentary and were then quizzed about it. When tested alone, the subjects readily gave correct answers. But when surrounded by a group proclaiming incorrect answers, they conformed in large numbers. Their rate of conforming was affected, however, by the experiment’s main manipulation: Half the subjects were administered oxytocin, a hormone famed for promoting social bonding and affiliation within groups, and the other half received a placebo.

Among those who didn’t get the hormone, about two-thirds conformed with the crowd. Of these, roughly half reverted to the correct answer when they were again on their own, while half stuck to the wrong, conformist answer even in private. Those who got oxytocin—which can swamp recipients with the need to belong—had a 15% boost in the rate of public conforming without any increase in the rate of private conforming.

This makes sense. Private conformity is the cognitively challenging effort of convincing yourself that 1+1=3. This involves activation of the visual cortex and the hippocampus, which is central to memory formation, and represents rewriting history in your own head: “Hey, hippocampus, it wasn’t really Option A. Remember how it was actually Option B? And you, visual cortex, you saw that it was B—come on, you know you saw it.”

By contrast, public conformity is a simpler process, merely requiring a desire to belong. Oxytocin makes us more emotionally involved with members of our own group and boosts our longing to agree with them—which doesn’t involve the cognitive contortions of private conformity. Just being safely part of the crowd is enough: “So you guys are saying the moon is made of cheese? Sure—group hug!”

Public and private conformity are quite different neurobiological processes, and we don’t know which variety most propels people to rally around untruths. But both options raise a similar Orwellian specter: that we can come to believe that war is peace, that freedom is slavery and that it definitely was Option B.

Corrections & Amplifications
The Weizmann Institute of Science is in Rehovot, Israel. An earlier version of this column incorrectly said the institute was in Haifa. (April 24, 2017)

Appeared in the April 22, 2017, print edition as 'The Brain Science Of Conformity.'


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