Conformity-As-A-Service

2023-06-29

Companies desire efficiency and profitability. At scale, whether industrial-style or Internet-style, the companies need resources to be efficient and interchangeable.

Even if unintended, companies offer "conformity-as-a-service" to their employees as illustrated by three psychological studies:

Asch Conformity Experiment

In the experiments, conducted in the 1950s, Solomon Asch gathered groups of 8 male college students.

All but one of these students were actors, instructed how to respond ahead of time. Only one participant was the actual subject.

The group was shown a line on a card and asked to match that line's length to one of the options provided.

All the actors would unanimously choose an obviously incorrect line length. The researchers wanted to see if the real subject would conform to the majority opinion, even though it was clearly wrong.

Over a series of 12 trials, about 75% of subjects conformed to the actors' judgement at least once. About 25% never conformed.

When asked later, most said that while they knew the group judgement was incorrect, they went along with it anyway.

The Invisible Gorilla Experiment

Created by psychologists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons of Harvard University and the University of Illinois in 1999, in this experiment, participants are shown a short video of two groups of people, one wearing white shirts and one wearing black shirts, passing basketballs.

The participants are asked to count the number of passes made by either the white or black shirted players.

During the video, a person in a gorilla suit walks between the players, faces the camera, thumps its chest and walks off.

Surprisingly, about half of the observers do not notice the gorilla at all.

Stanford Prison Experiment

The Stanford Prison Experiment was a famous psychology study conducted in 1971 by Philip Zimbardo.

In the study, Zimbardo and his team recruited 24 male college students to participate in a two-week prison simulation to investigate the psychological effects of perceived power and social roles.Here's a quick summary of the experiment:

Participants were randomly assigned to be either "guards" or "prisoners" in a mock prison constructed at Stanford University.

The guards were given authority over the prisoners and instructed to maintain order, but there were no strict rules on behavior. The prisoners were to remain in the prison 24 hours a day.

Within days, the participants adapted to their roles as either cruel, controlling guards or passive, compliant prisoners.

The guards began to punish prisoners for minor infractions and the prisoners began tolerating the abuse.

The experiment was planned to run two weeks but had to be stopped after just 6 days due to the disturbing and unexpected behaviors that emerged. Many "prisoners" were showing signs of psychological trauma.

Principles at Work

I thought of these three principles when contemplating many of the parts of working for companies that were painful and difficult.

Each one of these fall into action, and when combined in a given scenario, were devastating.

The Asch conformity showed how difficult it is for someone to express something factually true when others held another opinion.

The courage to call out a "short line" despite everyone else saying it is a "long line" becomes especially tough when there's authority at play -- as it always is in a company.

The Prison Experiment illustrates the ease at which people, whether directly enabled with authority or, by virtue of their personality, seize it, can misapply it, even if they have good intentions.

The "invisible gorilla" blindness to the conformity and its resulting behavior comes from a focus on personal survival or "KPIs."

Personal Example

I was in a meeting where a product manager was presenting his "vision" for networking alongside an analyst relations person. The product manager presented a networking stack which went against the grain of the industry -- no other stack worked this way.

In fact, the analyst we were preparing to brief had written an article describing the modern stack as I and my other colleague knew and were familiar with.

Yet, no one was willing to question this presentation, specifically, the AR representative and the PM's manager.

I, however, did ask the question, and they all turned as guards and questioned me for raising the question.

After we left, me and my colleague looked at each other in disbelief wondering how the entire presentation was able to proceed without anyone else pointing this discrepancy.

On the one hand, we had a PDF which I had forwarded showing the most recent article which included a diagram and description of the networking stack.

On the other hand, we had a slide showing an upside-down, Bizzaro-world version.

However, I think this happens more often than not.

When conformity, meets attention blindness, meets authoritarianism, you get a mixture of conformity-as-a-service.

Resistance is Futile. Vive la Résistance.

What can we take away from this?

Are all companies this way?

No.

But can we understand how normal social dynamics of power, efficiency, and human "dip-shittery" create a conformity?

The three experiments reveal this potential.

In many ways, they work together in a negative flywheel.

For example, the AR and the PM's manager applied Asch's conformity....but why?

Because something in the existing dynamic and relationship set up "guards" vs "prisoners" -- probably not an easy thing for many people to do, but common enough in corporate environments.

And blindness seeps in that it's happening in the first place.

The last is how "conformity" slips in, even to those who seek to escape.

Meaning, while in it, some just can't take it. But the majority of people don't even see it anymore.

So what happens if you fall in the "can't take it" camp?

I have taken the "resistance is futile" from within the company.

But "viva la resistance" if you have a side hustle or small bet.