Social Conformity & Cognitive Biases are more Powerful than Rational, Critical Thought in the Era of COVID - Even with so-called "Experts."
A tour through the powerful forces of social conformity & cognitive biases relevant to the media minefield we now live in, and infects even the minds of credentialed experts.
Been watching a lot of the civil libertarian crowd look at the events of the last 2+ years in the USA re. COVID & lockdowns, mandates, and the like, and make a lot of references to what is probably one of the most famous social psychology experiments of all time - the so-called “Milgram Experiment.”
In the aftermath of WWII (1950s) people in the United States & elsewhere were looking at the behavior of the Germans and were struggling with how the overwhelming majority of the German public had either stood idly by, or actively participated in what ended up being one of those most ghastly genocides in history.
So, the Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram set out to create an experimental analogue to the behavior of individual Germans as they committed, or tacitly supported, the acts of the Holocaust. In doing so, he found that by simply using confederates who played authority figures, he was able to accomplish a horrifying degree of acquiescence with orders to electrically shock screaming, protesting subjects (who were of course, actors) into unconsciousness.
Worth noting - subjects who dutifully shocked (tortured) complete strangers were simply just regular people.
You can read a pretty reasonable summary of Milgram’s work here (but honestly Milgram’s stuff is so talked about these days, you probably already know about it).
The reason why civil libertarians like referring to Milgram’s stuff is because it shows how average people can easily be conscripted into doing some of the most evil things imaginable - simply by invoking authority. Once a person is wearing the proper costume or uniform, complete with a shiny badge perhaps, or is speaking in front of a podium with an official-looking seal -people start suspending judgement, and bad things can happen - up to and including mass genocide.
But - what about these authority figures themselves? What makes them do what they do? Is it malice, thirst for power, hubris, or a desire to keep one’s job and insure a comfortable retirement? Well it could be those things, for sure - but there also could be some social psychology at play there as well.
For example - how is it that huge proportions of the public health establishment became seemingly and almost overnight in 2020 and beyond, so utterly convinced that community masking, overwhelmingly of the cloth and procedure mask variety, were such overwhelmingly critical and highly effective public health measures that were justifiable regardless of the cost (at times even denying that there was any significant cost)?
Same with so-called “lockdowns”? Is it because “the science” had changed? Or was it something else?
Well - it’s good to recognize that “the experts” are made up of people with the same socio-psychological foibles as the rest of us. In my opinion, the experts” and “those in charge” are just as victim of the powerful forces of social conformity, “groupthink,” and “crowd madness” that the average joes and janes amongst the rest of us are.
Let’s dig in a bit.
The Asch Experiments - AKA the “Conformity Delusion”
Let’s look at the lessons of a less well-known social psychology experiment on social conformity - that of the work of Swarthmore psychologist Solomon Asch.
Briefly - the way this experiment was conducted was to have a hapless subject placed in a room with seven other people who were, unbeknownst to them, all confederates (actors) - they were all in on the experiment.
The subject was brought in to perform a “vision test,” with the idea was for the subject to answer a series of very simple and clear-cut line discrimination tasks with what were only describable as laughably obvious answers. The trick was - each subject was placed at the end of the line, so that they had to witness all seven of the confederates provide answers that were all geared to be consistently and obviously wrong.
Interestingly - not only did this produce a high level of conformity with the incorrect majority (32% on average), a number of the subjects who made the incorrect line judgements actually said that they really did believe that their judgements were, in fact, correct ones (the rest of them simply said they ‘chose the incorrect answer because they didn’t want to look silly’ or something to that effect).
In other words, simply because of the (strong) social conformity pressure - the normal, relatively well-educated, upper middle class subjects in Solomon Asch’s conformity experiment literally hallucinated visual phenomena that had no bearing on reality.1 The power of social pressure literally created a “conformity delusion” - very similar to what we might call “crowd madness.”
Social Conformity amongst the Expert Class
This has immediate bearing on the last 2+ years. A lot of us, myself included, have been shocked by how quickly the “experts” suddenly jettisoned what appeared to be the last 100+ years of understanding on masking when it came to the question of the spread of aerosolized, respiratory viruses (which I talk about here), or the consensus of the public health community which existed at least prior to 2006 as regarded so-called “lockdowns”:
… But when you remember that the “experts” themselves are really just people - like these college students in the Solomon Asch experiment, things make a lot more sense.
A lot of things had to fall into place for these events to happen - and I’ll try and at least touch upon them here.
Regarding lockdown itself: there was a concerted political element - and some odd - as Jeffrey Tucker documents - historical events (including a high-school science project) that resulted in the highest levels of government endorsing a completely unproven and basically unthinkable idea being enshrined as official government policy.
For lockdown and masking - there was a sense of emergency when COVID started burbling up in the media. The sense of emergency was curiously unparalleled to earlier, similar viral pandemics (like the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, or the 1968 Hong Kong Flu). Regardless of the reason - there was a lot of perceived need to act immediately because of the perceived level of emergency.
Regarding this - my personal view is that the sense of emergency came about due to a confluence of factors: among other things, societal anomie producing an emotional vacuum to which the societal panic of COVID neatly fit, and a good degree of political entrepreneurialism of the “never let a good crisis go to waste” variety (which author Ben Irvine does an excellent job deconstructing in his new book).
Finally, I would also include the ascendance and power of social media which produced a galloping case of a so-called “availability cascade.”
What is an “Availability Cascade”?
I want to refer everyone to an extremely dense and lengthy article on this subject, which was published in the Stanford Law Review in 1999 (here) by authors Cass Sunstein and Timur Kuran.
To understand what an “availability cascade” is - you need to understand the original concept it builds upon, that of the “availability heuristic” - a mental shortcut that we all tend to use, which is useful for assessing probabilities but often results in significant cognitive biases.
The classic example of an availability heuristic at work is, of course, when you ask average people on the street - “what is more dangerous, driving in a car, or flying in an airplane.” While most people would think for a moment and answer “of course it’s cars” - many do not, and say “planes” instead (despite the fact that plane travel is many orders of magnitude safer than driving a car).
When plane crashes happen - they’ve always been reported on in the news media and broadcast everywhere, being very sensational and therefore newsworthy events.
What this does is provides media consumer with readily “available” examples of plane crashes that tend to bias people towards overestimation the probability of death by airplane crashes - hence, the “availability heuristic,” AKA “availability bias.”
So - the idea of the “availability cascade” takes this idea further - this tendency of ours for our assessment of probability and risk to be warped by the prevailing information environment - and puts it on modern-day, social-media and information-technology enabled steroids.
As authors Timur Kuran & Cass Sunstein state:
The driving mechanism (behind an availability cascade) involves a combination of informational and reputational motives: Individuals endorse the perception partly by learning from the apparent beliefs of others and partly by distorting their public responses in the interest of maintaining social acceptance.
In other words, the social aspect of Twitter, or Facebook - the liking and sharing of posts, the attempts to *get* likes, the tendency of things to “go viral” on social media - this can create a cascading process where ideas get quickly magnified and cause availability bias to spike across social networks.
Moreover - Kuran and Sunstein talk about “availability entrepreneurs.”
Social agents who understand the dynamics of availability cascades and seek to exploit their insights may be characterized as availability entrepreneurs. Located anywhere in the social system, including the government, the media, nonprofit organizations, the business sector, and even households, these entrepreneurs attempt to trigger availability cascades likely to advance their own agendas. They do so by fixing people's attention on specific problems, interpreting phenomena in particular ways, and attempting to raise the salience of certain information.
… and as we of course have seen recently, it seems that government has indeed been an active “availability entrepreneur” in this whole process.
Perhaps a new term could be invented for the government mucking around with Big Tech censorship.
I’ll call them “availability monopolists.” You like it?
The Final Ingredients in the Toxic Cocktail - Big Tech & Big Media Censorship
The final ingredient that really provides the extra rocket fuel for all of this is Big Tech censorship, which provides both the illusion of consensus and also further fuels the “availability cascade” spoken about above.
Obviously over the past 2+ years we’ve seen an indisputable explosion of activity by major social media companies (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) to deplatform and cancel dissident voices that dare to speak out against the government-approved consensus for masks, lockdowns, and endless COVID vaccines and boosters (now for babies!)
So this is the cocktail
Big Tech censorship providing the illusion of consensus
The “availability cascade” provided by social media (magnified by Big Tech censorship)
The “Conformity Delusion” amongst the expert class
So is there any question as to why so many “experts” have lost their heads?
Due to the Environments they now work in - Physicians and Clinicians May be more Susceptible to to the “Conformity Delusion”
While we are all herd animals at our core and for most of us, the power of the group, the power to conform (to be liked, etc.) is enormously influential to the point of even warping our basic perceptions of reality, it’s true that in some cases, education and training can (or at least should) provide some protection against suffering from the “conformity delusion.”
As followup studies for Solomon Asch’s initial experiments, researchers in 1980 attempted to replicate his original design, this time using engineering, mathematics, and chemistry students - and found they were able to minimize the conformity delusion (only 1 out of 396 trials yielded conformity). From the article:
The Asch effect can, however, be demonstrated where subjects and settings are selected so that the personal costs of not yielding to the majority would be high. Thus, levels of compliance similar to those found by Asch were shown by youths on probation where the confederate group and the experimenter were probation officers, and by alienated black youths where the experimenter was white.
In other words, if a situation where decisionmakers have little to lose from making accurate judgements can be created, the “conformity delusion” effect can be minimized.
This is encouraging and makes intuitive sense - after all, the in some cases years of relevant training, education and experience that many experts have *should*, at least in theory, provide them with the ability to do more than just behave as herd animals - they should be able to rationally evaluate evidence despite the social and media environment. Right?
But maybe that’s only true when certain conditions are met.
Do we have those conditions now, for the average doctor or nurse in the medical world we now live in? Specific to doctors -
Solo practices are disappearing from the United States and being replaced increasingly by hospital-based & institutional practices (owing to the increasing centralization incentivized by rapidly increasing government regulations). This means doctors no longer have the freedom to speak their minds - they are employees.
The rise of “protocol-driven care.” In other words, as opposed to being clinical scientists who are there to evaluate individual cases and use clinical judgment to guide clinical decisions, physicians, clinicians, and hospitals are increasingly being required to provide care given algorithms and protocols often derived via official sources (such as the CDC) - at risk of malpractice liability if these guidelines are not followed.
Doctors these days tend to be pleasant and agreeable types as a group. While that’s great for the patient who likes the customer experience of a physician with “good bedside manner,” one would think the more disagreeable disposition of an engineer would allow for physicians and clinicians to be more resistant to being conscripted into fighting “moral health panics.”
Finally - I think I’m on pretty good standing to note that higher education (university and graduate level) has become largely politically monocultural (progressive leftist) over the past several decades in the United States.
This has had profound consequences, in my view, for how intellectual dissent is treated in the larger world as more and more of the credentialled class are brought into the world. Although this requires easily multiple articles to explore fully further, I think for productive rigorous intellectual discourse in higher education to survive and for it’s ability to produce an ongoing supply of independent, critical thinkers, higher education needs to go back to becoming a place where learning can be accomplished in an environment that openly respects political and religious views from across the philosophical spectrum.2
We don’t have that - which I think just reinforces the environment of conformity that we find ourselves in today.
Overall, I think there’s at least a few lessons to be learned about the past 2+ years:
Doctors are human and suffer from the same foibles, cognitive biases and distortions, and in fact have all sorts of social & economic incentives that militate against them making sound decisions in the face of public pressure.
Many of the trends of the last several decades such as the political monoculture of higher education, the rise of protocol-driven healthcare & disappearing independent practices have made doctors less willing or able to speak out with an independent voice.
Politically-biased ‘Big Tech’ censorship has a toxic effect on scientific debate, particularly given the unfortunate intertwining of politics and science of late (e.g., Facebook & Twitter somehow becoming arbiters of scientific truth and falsehood).
‘Big Tech’ censorship magnifies and adds “rocket fuel” to “availability cascades” and provokes mass “delusions of conformity” (e.g., crowd madness).
Conclusion
Unless we all start grappling with them honestly at the highest levels, I think we’re going to see further ongoing “crises” opportunistically fomented and taken advantage of by small groups of (overwhelmingly unelected) people in government, along with their revolving-door buddies in private industry. What Kuran & Sunstein call “availability entrepreneurs,” or - in the case of government, what I’ve taken to calling “availability monopolists.”
Or - just “grifters.”
Just remember - there’s a lot of “experts” on Twitter and otherwise in the media that seem to have very high conviction in their positions that mask mandates need to return, and that “masks work,” that COVID is lethal to children, that “Long COVID” is a thing, that lockdowns worked, that Monkeypox is an existential crisis.
Some of these “experts” may be, as I said - simply crass political opportunists and grifters. There may be a few that are staking out these positions due to a careful, sober take on the evidence. I would say there are far more of them that have simply fallen prey to the “conformity delusion.”
They’re trapped in the proverbial Matrix and like so many others out there - and they can’t get out.
Obviously there’s been a lot of attempts to replicate Asch’s experiment and more or less, they have been able to - although depending on the subject pool, the task involved, or other factors, the degree of conformity does change over time. Good review of all of this here.
If you want to learn more about a group that’s working to try and change this “political monoculture” problem in higher education - check out the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. Good stuff.
As usual, unbelievably cogent and brilliantly written by Gerodoc!!
Great article!!