Inform Yourself

One reason why our legacy of dependence on management persists today is due to a basic human need to fit in. At our core, all humans have a basic fundamental need to belong. Evolution has taught us that survival and prosperity is more likely if we live and work together. However, to live together, we need to agree on common beliefs, values, attitudes and behaviors. We thus learn to conform to the rules or expectations of other people. And the more we see others behaving in a certain way or making particular decisions, the more we feel obliged to follow suit. Most people will be unwilling to publicly express their opinion if they believe they are in the minority. They will also be more vocal if they believe they are a part of the majority. This works because we fear social rejection.

While we would like to believe that real people would never do such a thing, unfortunately conformity is not restricted to only imaginary characters. According to Dr. Heather Williamson, a professor of social psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University, all humans have a basic need to want to fit in. One reason is called the Similarity Principle, which states that, “we trust people who are like us or who are similar to people we like” says Dr. Williamson. She says that, “when we are trying to decide whether to trust someone, we often do not have time to find out how trustworthy they actually are, so we take a short-cut by assuming that someone who is either similar to us or who is similar to someone we would trust can be trusted themselves.”

We seek similarity in beliefs, values, attitudes, ways of thinking, understanding and deciding. We also look for short cuts in physical appearance, words and actions. Since we long to be trusted it is in our best interest to be similar to others, and therefore we strive to conform, to fit in, to be like the rest.

Another reason we conform is due to a psychological phenomenon called Majority Influence. The degree of influence that this effect can have on us is surprisingly strong. The Asch conformity experiments, performed by Dr. Solomon Asch in the 1950's, were a series of studies that starkly demonstrated the power of conformity in social groups, and how we aren’t as far from Smith’s description of his countrymen as we might like to think. Asch asked groups of students to participate in a "vision test", but in reality, all but one of the participants were working with Asch, and the study was really about how the remaining student would conform to the other student’s behavior. All of the subjects were seated in a classroom and were presented with two cards. One had on it a 'standard' line; on the other were three comparison lines. They were asked to judge which of the comparison lines was equal in length to the standard line.

The group was told to announce their answers out loud and the only true study participant would always be the last to answer. While this sole study participant didn’t know it, the other students were secretly instructed to give the wrong answer. The idea was to see if the single study participant would conform to the group and give the same answer as the others, even when it was obviously the wrong answer. In other words, when asked, all of the student’s working with Professor Asch would state that standard line was the same as line A or C on the second card. Even though this was obviously wrong, the one student who wasn’t a part of the Asch’s group would give the same answer.

The results showed that 75% of the time the single participant gave a knowingly wrong answer to at least one question, whenever the control group gave the wrong answer. Of the 125 participants, only 25% gave the correct answer every time, compared to the 95% result from a control group. Clearly participants did not want to stand out like a sore thumb or rock the boat, risking group disapproval. The power of majority influence was shown as participants nervously sweated and squirmed in their seats. The lie they were telling was blatant, but they did it anyway so as not to stand out and risk not being accepted or trusted.

Due to majority influence, people are more likely to depend on others for the answer. Also, the more knowledgeable a person is, or the more authority they have, the more valuable they are as a resource, thus people are even more likely to turn to experts or leaders for guidance.

Studies like these go to show us that one of our most basic human instincts is to follow the crowd, but that doesn’t mean doing so is always the right thing to do. Conformity can have either good or bad effects on people. Driving safely is an example of where conformity serves us well. Trying drugs because of peer pressure is an example of where a need to fit in doesn’t serve us well at all. The Asch experiments proved that people frequently followed the majority judgment, even when the majority was wrong. And even though more and more people feel inauthentic in their roles today, and even though somewhere deep down inside they know it is wrong, they continue do it anyway.

The desire to be like others and to follow the crowd reinforces the legacy of dependence we have on others telling us how to be successful. What works for another works because of their unique talents. This doesn’t mean, however, that the same will work for you unless of course you happen to have an identical set of talents, which is next to impossible.

Perhaps Peter Drucker sums this legacy problem up best when he says, “in a few hundred years, when the history of our time is written from a long-term perspective, it is likely that the most important event those historians will see is not technology, not the internet, not e-commerce. It is an unprecedented change in the human condition. For the first time – literally – substantial and rapidly growing numbers of people have choices. For the first time, they will have to manage themselves. And society is totally unprepared for it.” Becoming authentic and achieving the 5th level of performance requires that you stop following and start leading – yourself.