I lived in a communist regime until I was 13, and my general impression was that everything was mostly okay and everyone was mostly happy. That was partially a childhood naiveté, but also partially an effect of censorship. Even if I was dissatisfied with something, I didn't attribute it specifically to the political regime, but to failures of specific people, and the failures of bureaucracy which is a necessary evil of a civilized society. All problems seemed like "first-world problems". (Actually, attributing all failures to individuals was explicitly encouraged by the regime. Assuming the individuals were not powerful communists, of course.)
I had absolutely no idea that there were people around me who had their family members kidnapped by the secret police and tortured, sometimes to death, for "crimes" such as having a different opinion and debating it with other similar "criminals". I didn't understand why all documents about me emphasised that I had "workers' lineage" when in fact both my parents had university education; but I assumed it was just another weird bureaucratic way of speech. (It actually meant that I was free from the hereditary sin of "bourgeois lineage" i.e. having an entrepreneur among my ancestors. People with "bourgeois lineage" were not allowed to study at universities, and couldn't get any good job as long as someone else with "workers' lineage" was available for the same job.)
After learning all this information (and realizing that it actually explained a few weird things that I previously noticed but didn't have a good explanation for), I couldn't see the situation with the same eyes anymore.
The important thing is that this knowledge is now a public knowledge, which means that not only "I know" and "you know", but also "I know that you know" and "you know that I know that you know", et cetera.
If there is only one person "making problems", it is easy for the regime to get rid of them, while maintaining the façade. After midnight, a group of men in black coats with guns will knock on their door and take them away. Worst case, the family will never hear about them again, officially. Unofficially, sometimes a stranger on the street will later tell them to not expect their family member back because he's dead; and no, you won't even receive the body for burial, because fuck you, you anticommunist filth! (Also the relatives will get written in their documents "a relative of a suspected traitor", which means: forget ever studying at a university or getting a good job.)
If a group of people "makes problems" publicly, the police will quickly take them away, and no media will ever mention the story. But if a large group of people makes a public demonstration at the center of a big city, and if they refuse to surrender quickly and silently to the police, then too many people will notice that "something happened". The regime now cannot deal with the problem by usual silence. They will probably publish an official explanation, something like: "A small group of traitors paid by Americans was trying to disrupt our peace and prosperity, but don't worry, our brave policemen have eliminated the threat. Please stay calm and don't listen to any rumors; also report all suspicious behavior and rumor spreading to the police." But even this kinda admits that some people have some objections, so the façade of "we are all one big happy family" starts cracking apart. And people are too curious, so various rumors will start spreading anyway.
On the other hand, even this public knowledge can be reversed. One should never underestimate the capacity of motivated people to deny anything. A few years later, when the shock of seeing the true face of regime has faded, if some sympathizers of the previous regime remained at power, they can create a synchronized denial. All they have to do is to start saying publicly: "This never happened; actually this is all merely American propaganda". At the beginning everyone knows it's a lie, but now also people who want to turn a blind eye to everything know that actually there is a socially acceptable way to deny everything; that they are not a powerless minority. So they start repeating the denial as a way signal belonging to their tribe. And their children will grow up actually believing that nothing bad happened, and that everything is merely a propaganda. And it's just a question of time until people start saying: "Well, why don't we get rid of the American propaganda now, and return to the glorious old days?".
What you describe is the winding-down days of communism, during it's hayday the arrests and torture didn't happen in the middle of the night, but in broad daylight, to cheering crowds. This phenomenon, not limited to communist states, works as follows:
The official line is not that everybody is happy and everything is perfect, but that everything would be perfect if it wasn't for the rightists/heretics/sexists/racists/etc. (depending on the society). The insidious thing about this is that anybody who has a different opinion and debates it can be charged w...
So I'm going through the sequences (in AI to Zombies) and I get to the bit about Asch's Conformity Experiment.
It's a good bit of writing, but I mostly pass by without thinking about it too much. I've been taught about the experiment before, and while Eliezer's point of whether or not the subjects were behaving rationally is interesting, it kind of got swallowed up by his discussion of lonely dissent, which I thought was more engaging.
Later, after I'd passed the section on cult attractors and got into the section on letting go, a thought occurred to me, something I'd never actually thought before.
Eliezer notes:
That answer is surprising. It was surprising to me the first time I learned about the experiment, and I think it's surprising to just about everyone the first time they hear it. Same thing with a lot of the psychology surrounding heuristics and biases, actually. Forget the Inquisition - no one saw the Stanford Prison Experiment coming.
Here's the thought I had: Why was that result so surprising to me?
I'm not an expert in history, but I know plenty of religious people. I've learned about the USSR and China, about Nazi Germany and Jonestown. I have plenty of available evidence of times where people went along with things they wouldn't have on their own. And not all of them are negative. I've gone to blood drives I probably wouldn't have if my friends weren't going as well.
When I thought about what my prediction would be, had I been asked what percentage of people I thought would dissent before being told, I think I would have guessed that more than 80% of subject would consistently dissent. If not higher.
And yet that isn't what the experiment shows, and it isn't even what history shows. For every dissenter in history, there have to be at least a few thousand conformers. At least. So why did I think dissent was the norm?
I notice that I am confused.
So I decide to think about it, and my brain immediately spits out: you're an American in an individualistic culture. Hypothesis: you expect people to conform less because of the culture you live in/were raised in. This begs the question: have their been cross-cultural studies done on Asch's Conformity Experiment? Because if people in China conform more than people in America, then how much people conform probably has something to do with culture.
A little googling brings up a 1996 paper that does a meta-analysis on studies that repeated Asch's experiments, either with a different culture, or at a later date in time. Their findings:
So, while the paper isn't definitive, it (and the papers it draws from) show reasonable evidence that there is a cultural impact on how much people conform.
I thought about that for a little while, and then I realized that I hadn't actually answered my own question.
My confusion stems from the disparity between my prediction and reality. I'm not wondering about the effect culture has on conformity (the territory), I'm wondering about the effect culture has on my prediction of conformity (the map).
In other words, do people born and raised in a culture with collectivist values (China, for example) or who actually do conform beyond the norm (people who are in a flying-saucer cult, or the people actually living in a compound) expect people to conform more than I did? Is their map any different from mine?
Think about it - with all the different cult attractors, it probably never feels as though you are vastly conforming, even if you are in a cult. The same can probably be said for any collectivist society. Imagine growing up in the USSR - would you predict that people would conform with any higher percentage than someone born in 21st century America? If you were raised in an extremely religious household, would you predict that people would conform as much as they do? Less? More?
How many times have I agreed with a majority even when I knew they probably weren't right, and never thought of it as "conformity"? It took a long time for my belief in god to finally die, even when I could admit that I just believed that I believed. And why did I keep believing (or keep trying to/saying that I believed)?
Because it's really hard to actually dissent. And I wasn't even lonely.
So why was my map that wrong?
What background process or motivated reasoning or...whatever caused that disparity?
One thing that, I think, contributes, is that I was generalizing from fictional evidence. Batman comes far more readily to my mind than Jonestown. For that matter, Batman comes more readily to my mind than the millions of not-Batmans in Gotham city. I was also probably not being moved by history enough. For every Spartacus, there are at minimum hundreds of not-Spartuses, no matter what the not-Spartacuses say when asked.
But to predict that three-quarters of subjects would conform at least once seems to require a level of pessimism beyond even that. After all, there were no secret police in Asch's experiment; no one had emptied their bank accounts because they thought the world was ending.
Perhaps I'm making a mistake by putting myself into the place of the subject of the experiment. I think I'd dissent, but I would predict that most people think that, and most people conformed at least once. I'm also a reasonably well-educated person, but that didn't seem to help the college students in the experiment.
Has any research been done on people's prediction of their own and other's conformity, particularly across cultures or in groups that are "known" for their conformity (communism, the very religious, etc.)? Do people who are genuine dissenters predict that more people will dissent than people who genuinely conform?
I don't think this is a useless question. If you're starting a business that offers a new solution to a problem where solutions already exist, are you overestimating how many people will dissent and buy your product?