Anyone who has decided to strike off the mainstream path has experienced this: Strong admonitions and warnings against what they were doing, and pressures not do it.
It doesn’t really matter what it is you’re trying to change. If you’re trying to become a nondrinker in a drinking culture, if you’re trying to quit eating junk food, if you’re trying to become a vegetarian or otherwise have a different diet, this will have happened to you.
If you decide to pursue a nontraditional career path (artist, entrepreneur, etc), you will have experienced this.
If you try to live a different lifestyle than the people around you – for instance, rising each day at 4:30AM and sleeping early instead of partying, you will have experienced this.
People will pressure and cajole you in many different ways to keep doing it the old way. Almost always, it will be phrased as though they’re looking after your best interest.
The specifics will vary. It could be phrased as cautious prudence – “What if your business doesn’t succeed and you don’t have a college degree? That could be really bad for you.”
It could be phrased as desiring for you to have the best way in life – “Go on, live a little, a beer won’t kill you.”
It could be encouraging you to do whatever you’ve set out to change without any specific reasoning at all.
I used to wonder why this is so common. Are people stupid? Or malicious? They must be one of those two.
If someone has a preference that has an expected value of a better life for them and they really want to live that preference, then why would someone that’s in their peer group or family want to discourage them? Is it because they have different calculations of what’s valuable, even when pursuing obvious no-brainer decisions like quitting the lowest quality junk foods? Is it because they’re malicious and want to hold you back and tear you down?
I think now – neither. Rather, I think it’s an uncritical, unexamined form of desire for equality.
The egalitarian instinct is strong in humans. Most people want others to do and act broadly similar to them. It’s almost an affront if you don’t live the normal way – do you think you’re better than them? No matter how subtle, gracious, or modest you try to be about it, it makes people feel bad if you’re breaking from the egalitarian way.
There’s plenty of research on this. High performers getting punished or shunned.
The French in the title is probably wrong (you’re welcome to correct it if you’re fluent), but I think it has a nice ring to it – Egalite Irréfléchi. Unthinking egalitarianism.
There’s a place for some egalitarianism in the world. A desire to bring others up, to open opportunities for others, to decentralize knowledge, to make resources available for people who want to use them.
But that’s a thoughtful egalitarianism, that examines how we can get everyone to be better. An unthinking egalitarianism generally promotes the status quo and punishes people who strive to do better.
But it’s not stupid or malicious. Stupidity implies poor judgment and malice implies poor motivations. Rather, the egalitarian instinct appears to be natural to most people. Pressures on you to conform (even when conforming is bad for your health and life) are not made out of stupidity or malicious intent, but rather from a natural instinctual drive towards equality that was never carefully examined.
Your mom's advice only makes sense if your goal is to be average, because being a member of said group will make it difficult to do any better than average.
It's also an example of status-quo bias, because she's defining "reality" as whatever "average" people believe... but the type of people she considers "average" is itself determined by her pre-existing beliefs.
In other words, if you taboo "average", you find that the advice is really saying, "don't change, because you won't fit in with my group any more"!
(That is, it's exactly what we'd expect someone faced with a changing ally would say.)
I said "seek out peer groups in which their desired/target behaviors are normal".
In other words, the presupposition is that you've already come to the conclusion that you want to have those beliefs or behaviors, because you evaluated them before choosing to participate in the group in question.
But it nonetheless beats the crap out of the article's hypothesis, which posits an entirely new piece of machinery, rather than falling naturally out of existing theory (i.e humans are motivated by status and alliances, behavior signals likely alliances or changes of alliance, etc.).
AFAICT, nothing I've said in the explanation proposes any new instincts, machinery, or inclinations that aren't already textbook ev. psych. IOW, based on what we know so far, my explanation should be what we should predict even if we didn't already know people did this sort of thing.
Ah, there's the kicker. I thought her advice was good, but I had never realized that I could check out groups' behaviors in order to see if they're good or bad, rather than just blindly joining a group and hoping it's a good one. This should change my behavior in the future.