For people reading this site, the most vivid analogy here might be being forced to live in a town full of religious hicks in the south of the USA, with minimal contact with the outside world. (I’ve heard from reliable sources that the stereotypes about the South are accurate.)
I’d caution against using this as an example. Not just because it’s a stereotype, or just because there’s a wide variation in that stereotype, but because it’s neither the most effective or the most common level of social pressure that inspires conformity. When you say “Bible-Thumping Redneck”, readers will jump to some level of coercion between Inherit the Wind, and a literal torch-and-pitchfork-wielding mob. That’s meaningful, but it’s also an iceberg situation: the most obvious answer is not the full answer, and can distract you from the full answer. It tempts folk to think about social incentives that affect expression of belief, rather than social incentives that alter beliefs themselves.
A good deal of effective social conformity is far more subtle. You need a much greater form of self-introspection to counter this attribute than you’d expect, and it’s far more pervasive than your example would suggest.
So, in the Wikipedia article about the Asch Conformity Experiment, it says that 25% of study participants never gave an incorrect answer. I’d expect readers of a blog about how to think rationally to plausibly be in the top 10% of the population when it comes to thinking rationally, so I doubt many of us would give incorrect answers in the Asch Conformity Experiment (except as a deliberate choice to tell a lie in order to fit in better).
I agree that a town full of religious hicks is maybe a bad example to anchor from. My thought was that some people are going to pretend that social pressure to conform with their beliefs doesn’t exist, so if I convince them that they’d feel uncomfortable in the extreme case, then maybe I can convince them that something subtler happens in less extreme cases. Speaking personally, even though people who read Less Wrong agree with me on much more than a typical person does, I still notice substantial social incentives for me to conform with them better… and I had a reputation as a contented misfit in high school. So yes, I agree pressure to conform is very pervasive. My thought was by deconstructing the psychological and social pressures involved, they’d lose some of their power and we could consciously decide how best to deal with each pressure. I’d love to hear if you’ve detected additional subtle pressures in your own thinking that I didn’t mention in my post.
I’d caution against using this as an example. Not just because it’s a stereotype, or just because there’s a wide variation in that stereotype, but because it’s neither the most effective or the most common level of social pressure that inspires conformity. When you say “Bible-Thumping Redneck”, readers will jump to some level of coercion between Inherit the Wind, and a literal torch-and-pitchfork-wielding mob. That’s meaningful, but it’s also an iceberg situation: the most obvious answer is not the full answer, and can distract you from the full answer. It tempts folk to think about social incentives that affect expression of belief, rather than social incentives that alter beliefs themselves.
A good deal of effective social conformity is far more subtle. You need a much greater form of self-introspection to counter this attribute than you’d expect, and it’s far more pervasive than your example would suggest.
So, in the Wikipedia article about the Asch Conformity Experiment, it says that 25% of study participants never gave an incorrect answer. I’d expect readers of a blog about how to think rationally to plausibly be in the top 10% of the population when it comes to thinking rationally, so I doubt many of us would give incorrect answers in the Asch Conformity Experiment (except as a deliberate choice to tell a lie in order to fit in better).
I agree that a town full of religious hicks is maybe a bad example to anchor from. My thought was that some people are going to pretend that social pressure to conform with their beliefs doesn’t exist, so if I convince them that they’d feel uncomfortable in the extreme case, then maybe I can convince them that something subtler happens in less extreme cases. Speaking personally, even though people who read Less Wrong agree with me on much more than a typical person does, I still notice substantial social incentives for me to conform with them better… and I had a reputation as a contented misfit in high school. So yes, I agree pressure to conform is very pervasive. My thought was by deconstructing the psychological and social pressures involved, they’d lose some of their power and we could consciously decide how best to deal with each pressure. I’d love to hear if you’ve detected additional subtle pressures in your own thinking that I didn’t mention in my post.