On Not Speaking Up
We’ve all experienced a time – maybe in a class or seminar – where the teacher pauses to ask if everyone understands the material so far. Everyone around you nods. But you have no clue what is going on. Instead, you nod along too rather than raising your hand.
Or, perhaps you’ve experienced a team meeting where everyone seemed to agree on something. You think it’s a terrible idea, but keep that to yourself. After all, conventional wisdom suggests it better not to ‘rock the boat’.
Maybe it’s fine when discussing where to host the holiday party. But extrapolate that behaviour to policymakers, board-members, or anyone making decisions that could impact the well-being of others… well then we’ve got a problem.
This week, we explore why we don’t speak up, but instead conform.
Solomon Asch’s Classic Conformity Experiments
Asch (1951) designed an experiment that shows even when there is an obvious answer, we can be swayed away from it by group pressure.
The experiment went like this: a participant was to do a line judgement task with seven other participants – except that the other participants were actually actors, and the participant had no idea. Guised as a vision test, each participant had to judge which of the lines (A, B, or C) were the same length as the target line and state their answer aloud.
Example of the line judgement task.
The actors pre-determined their answers. They did 18 line judgement tasks, and the actors purposefully agreed to answer 12 of them obviously incorrectly to see if the real participant would conform to their answer.
The results show that around a third of the participants confirmed to the incorrect answers presented by the actors in those particular 12 trials most of the time. 75% of the participants conformed at least once. In the post-experiment interview, many of the participants said they knew they were giving the wrong answer, but did it anyway because they did not want to be judged by their peers in the room. Some of them even said they believed the group’s answer was actually correct.
This surprising result demonstrates two motivations to conform: trying to fit in with a group (normative influence) or believing that the group is wiser than the individual (informational influence).
Check out this recreation of the experiment here:
Some other factors that Asch found to impact conformity:
Group size (the more people giving the wrong answer, the more likely the participant was to agree – but only up to a point). Conformity seems to peek at 3-5 people.
A dissenting ally – even one other person giving a different answer can reduce conformity up to 80%.
Task difficulty – when the task was made more difficult, the participant tended to rely more on the group’s answer.
Answering in private – this decreased the conformity.
Has this ever happened to you? Your work colleagues propose a new policy but because there’s no other dissenting voice, you keep your thoughts to yourself?
Why does this conformity happen? What’s really driving it? Some scholars believe that it can be explained by the concept of Pluralistic Ignorance.
Pluralistic Ignorance
As a social species, we look to others’ behaviour to guide our own – through an elaborate system of social norms. Conforming to the group’s behaviours or norms (even if you feel differently about them!!!) signals that you are a part of this group.
Pluralistic ignorance happens when individuals in a group who disagree with the prevailing behaviour or feel differently about it than the pack, believe that they are the only one who feels differently than everyone else, even if that might not be true.
This happens because people’s thoughts and feelings are opaque to us – we don’t know what other people are thinking and feeling – so we have to infer it from their behaviour. Everyone seems to be going along with the plan so I must be the only one who feels differently. The discrepancy between public actions and private sentiments can lead to widespread adherence to the prevailing behaviour or social norm.
It’s usually a function of wanting to be a part of a group. For example, Prentice and Miller (1993) found that many students were privately more uncomfortable with college alcohol practices than “the average student”, but since they didn’t want to show dissenting behaviour because they wanted to be part of the group, the social norm of reckless alcohol-related behaviour persisted.
Here’s an interesting extra finding about how behaviour shifts over time in line with what people perceive others to be doing: male behaviour eventually shifted towards what they perceived as the prevailing attitude towards drinking (i.e., they conformed), but Prentice and Miller found no such shift for females, who instead felt social isolation.
What does this mean for students?
Collective bad decisions and alcohol-related deaths on campus.
What does this mean for politics?
There is evidence that many white southern Americans in the early 20th century disapproved of Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation, but conformed and supported them anyway. Many early 20th century Germans thought Hitler’s doctrine was repulsive, but they held their views privately because they thought their opinion was unique and feared falling out of favour. Let that sink in.
Pluralistic Ignorance is also thought to underlie The Impostor Syndrome (see my earlier writings on this topic here). Privately we know the effort and struggle we put into our work that leads to accomplishments, but when we look at others we don’t see their effort and it gives the impression that it was only hard for us. It has also been connected to phenomena like the Bystander Effect.
Speak Up!
Speak your morals. Speaking up or speaking out requires confidence – and I recognize that it’s not always easy to have confidence. I would argue that there are cases where we are morally obligated to speak out – especially if group behaviour will harm someone else. Think about how you’ll feel if you go along with a group’s decision that causes harm and use those negative feelings to motivate you to speak up early. Other people in the group might hold the same morals and your act of bravery might be the thing they need to hear to speak up too.
Speak up early. If you are worried that when the time comes to speak up you’ll be so worried about being punished in the group by being ridiculed or judged that you stay quiet, try setting up a meeting with the group early to talk about Pluralistic Ignorance and setting ground rules that allows for people to speak their mind in a more protected way. Explain how dissenting opinions (rather than group-think) can help lead to better outcomes, and make a system that works for everyone that allows people to safely bring up dissenting opinions.
Speak to an ally. If you fear the social consequences of speaking up individually, seek out an ally in the group to either bounce the idea off of or recruit for support. You might find that you both feel the same way, and collectively feel more comfortable approaching the rest of the group together. Who knows, there might be other people in the group who feel the same way.
Raise your hand – in class, with friends, in the boardroom. Diversity of thought and opinion is not only a wondrous part of humanity, but it is also a moral safeguard that has a chance of keeping us from hurtling down dangerous paths. Be brave!
With courage,
