Most people will do very bad things, including mob violence, if they are peer-pressured enough.
It’s not literally everyone, but there is no neurotype or culture that is immune to peer pressure.
Immunity to peer pressure is a rare accomplishment.
You wouldn’t assume that everyone in some category would be able to run a 4-minute mile or win a math olympiad. It takes a “perfect storm” of talent, training, and motivation.
I’m not sure anybody “just” innately lacks the machinery to be peer-pressured. That’s a common claim about autistics and loners, but I really don’t think it fits observation. Lots of people “don’t fit in” in one way, but are very driven to conform in other social contexts or about other topics.
Evidence that any culture (or subculture), present or past, didn’t have peer pressure seems really weak.
there are environments where being independent-minded or high-integrity is valorized, but most of them still have covert peer-pressure dynamics.
Possibly all robust resistance to peer pressure is intentionally cultivated?
In other words, maybe it’s not enough for a person to just not happen to feel a pull towards conformity. That just means they haven’t yet encountered the triggers that would make them inclined to conform.
If someone really can’t be peer-pressured, maybe they have to actually believe that peer pressure is bad and make an active effort to resist it. Even that doesn’t always succeed, but it’s a necessary condition.
upshot #1: It may be appropriate to be suspicious of claims like “I just hang out with those people, I’m not influenced by them.” Most people, in the long run, do get influenced by their peer group.
otoh I also don’t think cutting off contact with anyone “impure”, or refusing to read stuff you disapprove of, is either practical or necessary. we can engage with people and things without being mechanically “nudged” by them.
maybe the distinction between engaging in any way and viewing someone as your ingroup is important?
or maybe we just have to Get Good at resisting peer pressure (even though that’s super hard and rare.) Otherwise the next time some terrible thing happens to be popular, we’ll go along with it.
like...basic realism here. most things don’t last forever, it is an extraordinary claim to say that your virtue would survive any change in your culture.
upshot #2: “would probably have been a collaborator in Nazi Germany” is not actually that serious an accusation. it just means “like the majority of the population, not at all heroic.” in good circumstances, non-heroes make perfectly fine friends and neighbors. in bad circumstances, they might murder you. that’s what makes the circumstances bad!
and don’t be too quick to assume that someone who’s never been in bad circumstances would be a hero. it’s just hard to tell ahead of time.
otoh I also don’t think cutting off contact with anyone “impure”, or refusing to read stuff you disapprove of, is either practical or necessary. we can engage with people and things without being mechanically “nudged” by them.
I think the reason not to do this is because of peer pressure. Ideally you should have the bad pressures from your peers cancel out, and in order to accomplish this you need your peers to be somewhat decorrelated from each other, and you can’t really do this if all your peers and everyone you listen to is in the same social group.
What is categorized as “peer pressure” here? Explicit threats to report you to authorities if you don’t conform? I’m guessing not. But how about implicit threats? What if you’ve heard (or read in the news) stories about people who don’t conform—in ways moderately but not hugely more extreme than you—having their careers ruined? In any situation that you could call “peer pressure”, I imagine there’s always at least the possibility of some level of social exclusion.
The defining questions for that aspect would appear to be “Do you believe that you would face serious risk of punishment for not conforming?” and “Would a reasonable person in your situation believe the same?”. Which don’t necessarily have the same answer. It might, indeed, be that people whom you observe to be “conformist” are the ones who are oversensitive to the risk of social exclusion.
We call it “peer pressure” when it is constraining the individual (or at least some of them) without providing perceived mutual value. It is the same mechanism that leads to people collaborating for the common good. The interesting question is which forces or which environments lead to a negative sum game.
I kinda agree with the claim, but disagree with its framing. You’re imagining that peer pressure is something extraneous to the person’s core personality, which they want to resist but usually fail. Instead, the desire to fit in, to be respected, liked and admired by other people, is one of the core desires that most (virtually all?) people have. It’s approximately on the same level as e.g. the desire to avoid pain. So, people don’t “succumb to peer pressure”, they (unconsciously) choose to prioritize social needs over other considerations.
At the same time, the moral denouncing of groupthink is mostly a self-deception defense against hostile telepaths. With two important caveats:
Having “independent thinking” as part of the ethos of a social group is actually beneficial for that group’s ability to discover true things. While the members of such a group still feel the desire to be liked by other members, they also have the license to disagree without being shunned for it, and are even rewarded for interesting dissenting opinions.
Hyperbolic discount seems to be real, i.e. human preferences are time-inconsistent. For example, you can be tempted to eat candy when one is placed in front of you, while also taking measures to avoid such temptation in the future. Something analogous might apply to peer pressure.
he desire to fit in, to be respected, liked and admired by other people, is one of the core desires that most (virtually all?) people have. It’s approximately on the same level as e.g. the desire to avoid pain.
I think the comparison to pain is correct in the sense that some part of the brain (brainstem) is responding to bodily signals in the same mechanistic way as it is to pain signals. The desire to fit in is grounded in something. Steven Byrnes suggests a mechanism in Neuroscience of human social instincts: a sketch.
I won’t claim to be immune to peer pressure but at least on the epistemic front I think I have a pretty legible track record of believing things that are not very popular in the environments I’ve been in.
As for a specific group of people resistant to peer pressure—psychopaths. Psychopaths don’t conform to peer pressure easily—or any kind of pressure, for that matter. Many of them are in fact willing to murder, sit in jail, or otherwise become very ostracized if it aligns with whatever goals they have in mind. I’d wager that the fact that a large percentage of psychopaths literally end up jailed speaks for itself—they just don’t mind the consequences that much.
This is easily explained due to psychopaths being fearless and mostly lacking empathy. As far as I recall, some physiological correlates exist—psychopaths have a low cortisol response to stressors compared to normies. On top of the apparent fact that they are indifferent towards others’ feelings, some brain imaging data supports this as well.
What they might be more vulnerable to is that peer pressure sometimes goes hand in hand with power and success. Psychopaths like power and success, and they might therefore play along with rules to get more of what they want. That might look like caving in to peer pressure, but judging by how the pathology is contemporarily understood, I’d still say it’s not the pressure itself, but the benefits aligned with succumbing to it.
there is no neurotype or culture that is immune to peer pressure
Seems like the sort of thing that would correlate pretty robustly to big-5 agreeableness, and in that sense there are neurotypes immune to peer pressure.
Edit: One may also suspect a combination of agreeableness and non-openness
“Peer pressure” is a negatively-valanced term that could be phrased more neutrally as “social consequences”. Seems to me it’s good to think about what the social consequences of doing or not doing a thing will be (whether to “give in to peer pressure”, and act in such a way as to get positive reactions from other people/avoid negative reactions, or not), but not to treat conforming when there is social pressure as inherently bad. It can lead to mob violence. Or, it can lead to a simplified social world which is easier for everyone to navigate, because you’re doing things that have commonly understood meanings (think of teaching children to interact in a polite way). Or it can lead to great accomplishments, when someone internalizes whatever leads to status within their social hierarchy. Take away the social pressure to do things that impress other people, and lots of people might laze about doing the minimum required to have a nice life on the object-level, which in a society as affluent as the modern industrialized world is not much. There are of course other motivations for striving for internalized goals, but like, “people whose opinion I care about will be impressed” is one, and it does mean some good stuff gets done.
Someone who is literally immune to peer pressure to the extent that social consequences do not enter their mind as a thing that might happen or get considered at all in their decision-making, will probably face great difficulties in navigating their environment and accomplishing anything. People will try fairly subtle social pressure tactics, they will be disregarded as if they hadn’t happened, and the person who tried it will either have to disengage from the not-peer-pressurable person, or escalate to more blunt control measures that do register as a thing this person will pay attention to.
Even if I’m right about “is immune to peer pressure” not being an ideal to aim for, I still do acknowledge that being extremely sensitive to what others may think has downsides, and when taken to extremes you get “I can’t go to the store because of social anxiety”. A balanced approach would be aiming to avoid paranoia while recognizing social pressure when someone is attempting to apply some, without immediately reacting to it, and be able to think through how to respond on a case-by-case basis. This is a nuanced social skill. “This person is trying to blackmail me by threatening social exclusion through blacklisting or exposing socially damaging information about me if I don’t comply with what they want” requires a different response than “this person thinks my shirt looks tacky and their shirt looks cool. I note their sense of fashion, and how much importance they attach to clothing choices, and may choose to dress so as to get a particular reaction from them in future, without necessarily agreeing with/adopting/internalizing their perspective on the matter”, which in turn is different from “everyone in this room disagrees with me about thing X (or at least says they disagree, preference falsification is a thing) should I say it anyway?”.
The key, I would think, is to raise people to understand what social pressure is and its various forms, and that conformance is a choice they get to make rather than a thing they have to do or they’ll suffer social death. Choices have consequences, but the worst outcomes I’ve seen from peer pressure are when people don’t want to do the thing that is being peer-pressured towards, but don’t treat “just don’t conform” as an option they can even consider and ask what the consequences would be.
otoh I also don’t think cutting off contact with anyone “impure”, or refusing to read stuff you disapprove of, is either practical or necessary. we can engage with people and things without being mechanically “nudged” by them.
Is there a particular reason to believe this? Or is it more of a hope?
I think what might help is engaging with different kinds of people. A group’s pressure is weaker if you also meet people who openly believe that the group is a group of idiots. You can voice your concerns without fearing disapproval; but even if some things are difficult to explain to outsiders, at least you have a mental model of someone who would disagree.
But I also suspect that some people would just develop a different persona for each group, and let themselves be peer-pressured towards different extremes on different occasions.
some people would just develop a different persona for each group
That is possible but maybe only more likely if the groups are very clearly separate, such as when you are in a faraway country for a long time. But if you are e.g. in a multi-cultural city where there are many maybe even overlapping groups or where you can’t easily tell which group it is, it is more difficult to “overfit” and easier to learn a more general strategy. I think universal morality is something of the more general case of this.
Julian Jaynes would say that this is how human consciousness as we know it today has evolved.
Which makes me wonder, what would he say about the internet bubbles we have today. Did we perhaps already reach peak consciousness, and now the pendulum is swinging back? (Probably not, but it’s an interesting thought.)
Most people will do very bad things, including mob violence, if they are peer-pressured enough.
Shouldn’t this be weighted against the good things people do if they are peer-pressured? I think there’s value in not conforming but if all cultures have peer-pressure there needs to be a careful analysis of the pros and cons instead of simply strifing for immunity from it.
I’m not sure anybody “just” innately lacks the machinery to be peer-pressured.
My first thought here aren’t autists but psychopaths.
My fear is that this will extend to many aspects of the Trump administration (just look at how it’s vetting people based on who they voted for/if they believe in the 2020 election results), esp b/c some people who work in the government are now deleting their old tweets...
“Most people succumb to peer pressure”, https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/u3919iPfj
Most people will do very bad things, including mob violence, if they are peer-pressured enough.
It’s not literally everyone, but there is no neurotype or culture that is immune to peer pressure.
Immunity to peer pressure is a rare accomplishment.
You wouldn’t assume that everyone in some category would be able to run a 4-minute mile or win a math olympiad. It takes a “perfect storm” of talent, training, and motivation.
I’m not sure anybody “just” innately lacks the machinery to be peer-pressured. That’s a common claim about autistics and loners, but I really don’t think it fits observation. Lots of people “don’t fit in” in one way, but are very driven to conform in other social contexts or about other topics.
Evidence that any culture (or subculture), present or past, didn’t have peer pressure seems really weak.
there are environments where being independent-minded or high-integrity is valorized, but most of them still have covert peer-pressure dynamics.
Possibly all robust resistance to peer pressure is intentionally cultivated?
In other words, maybe it’s not enough for a person to just not happen to feel a pull towards conformity. That just means they haven’t yet encountered the triggers that would make them inclined to conform.
If someone really can’t be peer-pressured, maybe they have to actually believe that peer pressure is bad and make an active effort to resist it. Even that doesn’t always succeed, but it’s a necessary condition.
upshot #1: It may be appropriate to be suspicious of claims like “I just hang out with those people, I’m not influenced by them.” Most people, in the long run, do get influenced by their peer group.
otoh I also don’t think cutting off contact with anyone “impure”, or refusing to read stuff you disapprove of, is either practical or necessary. we can engage with people and things without being mechanically “nudged” by them.
maybe the distinction between engaging in any way and viewing someone as your ingroup is important?
or maybe we just have to Get Good at resisting peer pressure (even though that’s super hard and rare.) Otherwise the next time some terrible thing happens to be popular, we’ll go along with it.
like...basic realism here. most things don’t last forever, it is an extraordinary claim to say that your virtue would survive any change in your culture.
upshot #2: “would probably have been a collaborator in Nazi Germany” is not actually that serious an accusation. it just means “like the majority of the population, not at all heroic.” in good circumstances, non-heroes make perfectly fine friends and neighbors. in bad circumstances, they might murder you. that’s what makes the circumstances bad!
and don’t be too quick to assume that someone who’s never been in bad circumstances would be a hero. it’s just hard to tell ahead of time.
I think the reason not to do this is because of peer pressure. Ideally you should have the bad pressures from your peers cancel out, and in order to accomplish this you need your peers to be somewhat decorrelated from each other, and you can’t really do this if all your peers and everyone you listen to is in the same social group.
What is categorized as “peer pressure” here? Explicit threats to report you to authorities if you don’t conform? I’m guessing not. But how about implicit threats? What if you’ve heard (or read in the news) stories about people who don’t conform—in ways moderately but not hugely more extreme than you—having their careers ruined? In any situation that you could call “peer pressure”, I imagine there’s always at least the possibility of some level of social exclusion.
The defining questions for that aspect would appear to be “Do you believe that you would face serious risk of punishment for not conforming?” and “Would a reasonable person in your situation believe the same?”. Which don’t necessarily have the same answer. It might, indeed, be that people whom you observe to be “conformist” are the ones who are oversensitive to the risk of social exclusion.
We call it “peer pressure” when it is constraining the individual (or at least some of them) without providing perceived mutual value. It is the same mechanism that leads to people collaborating for the common good. The interesting question is which forces or which environments lead to a negative sum game.
I kinda agree with the claim, but disagree with its framing. You’re imagining that peer pressure is something extraneous to the person’s core personality, which they want to resist but usually fail. Instead, the desire to fit in, to be respected, liked and admired by other people, is one of the core desires that most (virtually all?) people have. It’s approximately on the same level as e.g. the desire to avoid pain. So, people don’t “succumb to peer pressure”, they (unconsciously) choose to prioritize social needs over other considerations.
At the same time, the moral denouncing of groupthink is mostly a self-deception defense against hostile telepaths. With two important caveats:
Having “independent thinking” as part of the ethos of a social group is actually beneficial for that group’s ability to discover true things. While the members of such a group still feel the desire to be liked by other members, they also have the license to disagree without being shunned for it, and are even rewarded for interesting dissenting opinions.
Hyperbolic discount seems to be real, i.e. human preferences are time-inconsistent. For example, you can be tempted to eat candy when one is placed in front of you, while also taking measures to avoid such temptation in the future. Something analogous might apply to peer pressure.
I think the comparison to pain is correct in the sense that some part of the brain (brainstem) is responding to bodily signals in the same mechanistic way as it is to pain signals. The desire to fit in is grounded in something. Steven Byrnes suggests a mechanism in Neuroscience of human social instincts: a sketch.
I won’t claim to be immune to peer pressure but at least on the epistemic front I think I have a pretty legible track record of believing things that are not very popular in the environments I’ve been in.
As for a specific group of people resistant to peer pressure—psychopaths. Psychopaths don’t conform to peer pressure easily—or any kind of pressure, for that matter. Many of them are in fact willing to murder, sit in jail, or otherwise become very ostracized if it aligns with whatever goals they have in mind. I’d wager that the fact that a large percentage of psychopaths literally end up jailed speaks for itself—they just don’t mind the consequences that much.
This is easily explained due to psychopaths being fearless and mostly lacking empathy. As far as I recall, some physiological correlates exist—psychopaths have a low cortisol response to stressors compared to normies. On top of the apparent fact that they are indifferent towards others’ feelings, some brain imaging data supports this as well.
What they might be more vulnerable to is that peer pressure sometimes goes hand in hand with power and success. Psychopaths like power and success, and they might therefore play along with rules to get more of what they want. That might look like caving in to peer pressure, but judging by how the pathology is contemporarily understood, I’d still say it’s not the pressure itself, but the benefits aligned with succumbing to it.
Seems like the sort of thing that would correlate pretty robustly to big-5 agreeableness, and in that sense there are neurotypes immune to peer pressure.
Edit: One may also suspect a combination of agreeableness and non-openness
“Peer pressure” is a negatively-valanced term that could be phrased more neutrally as “social consequences”. Seems to me it’s good to think about what the social consequences of doing or not doing a thing will be (whether to “give in to peer pressure”, and act in such a way as to get positive reactions from other people/avoid negative reactions, or not), but not to treat conforming when there is social pressure as inherently bad. It can lead to mob violence. Or, it can lead to a simplified social world which is easier for everyone to navigate, because you’re doing things that have commonly understood meanings (think of teaching children to interact in a polite way). Or it can lead to great accomplishments, when someone internalizes whatever leads to status within their social hierarchy. Take away the social pressure to do things that impress other people, and lots of people might laze about doing the minimum required to have a nice life on the object-level, which in a society as affluent as the modern industrialized world is not much. There are of course other motivations for striving for internalized goals, but like, “people whose opinion I care about will be impressed” is one, and it does mean some good stuff gets done.
Someone who is literally immune to peer pressure to the extent that social consequences do not enter their mind as a thing that might happen or get considered at all in their decision-making, will probably face great difficulties in navigating their environment and accomplishing anything. People will try fairly subtle social pressure tactics, they will be disregarded as if they hadn’t happened, and the person who tried it will either have to disengage from the not-peer-pressurable person, or escalate to more blunt control measures that do register as a thing this person will pay attention to.
Even if I’m right about “is immune to peer pressure” not being an ideal to aim for, I still do acknowledge that being extremely sensitive to what others may think has downsides, and when taken to extremes you get “I can’t go to the store because of social anxiety”. A balanced approach would be aiming to avoid paranoia while recognizing social pressure when someone is attempting to apply some, without immediately reacting to it, and be able to think through how to respond on a case-by-case basis. This is a nuanced social skill. “This person is trying to blackmail me by threatening social exclusion through blacklisting or exposing socially damaging information about me if I don’t comply with what they want” requires a different response than “this person thinks my shirt looks tacky and their shirt looks cool. I note their sense of fashion, and how much importance they attach to clothing choices, and may choose to dress so as to get a particular reaction from them in future, without necessarily agreeing with/adopting/internalizing their perspective on the matter”, which in turn is different from “everyone in this room disagrees with me about thing X (or at least says they disagree, preference falsification is a thing) should I say it anyway?”.
The key, I would think, is to raise people to understand what social pressure is and its various forms, and that conformance is a choice they get to make rather than a thing they have to do or they’ll suffer social death. Choices have consequences, but the worst outcomes I’ve seen from peer pressure are when people don’t want to do the thing that is being peer-pressured towards, but don’t treat “just don’t conform” as an option they can even consider and ask what the consequences would be.
Is there a particular reason to believe this? Or is it more of a hope?
it’s an introspection/lived-experience/anecdotes from other people kind of thing, i don’t have data, but yes i do believe this is true.
I think what might help is engaging with different kinds of people. A group’s pressure is weaker if you also meet people who openly believe that the group is a group of idiots. You can voice your concerns without fearing disapproval; but even if some things are difficult to explain to outsiders, at least you have a mental model of someone who would disagree.
But I also suspect that some people would just develop a different persona for each group, and let themselves be peer-pressured towards different extremes on different occasions.
That is possible but maybe only more likely if the groups are very clearly separate, such as when you are in a faraway country for a long time. But if you are e.g. in a multi-cultural city where there are many maybe even overlapping groups or where you can’t easily tell which group it is, it is more difficult to “overfit” and easier to learn a more general strategy. I think universal morality is something of the more general case of this.
Julian Jaynes would say that this is how human consciousness as we know it today has evolved.
Which makes me wonder, what would he say about the internet bubbles we have today. Did we perhaps already reach peak consciousness, and now the pendulum is swinging back? (Probably not, but it’s an interesting thought.)
Shouldn’t this be weighted against the good things people do if they are peer-pressured? I think there’s value in not conforming but if all cultures have peer-pressure there needs to be a careful analysis of the pros and cons instead of simply strifing for immunity from it.
My first thought here aren’t autists but psychopaths.
My fear is that this will extend to many aspects of the Trump administration (just look at how it’s vetting people based on who they voted for/if they believe in the 2020 election results), esp b/c some people who work in the government are now deleting their old tweets...