Page 32 - The Social Animal

14 The Social Animal

This passage from Thurber, although comical, is an apt illustra-
tion of people conforming. One or two individuals began running for
their own reasons; before long, everyone was running. Why? Because
others were running. According to Thurber’s story, when the running
people realized that the dam hadn’t given way after all, they felt
pretty foolish. And yet, how much more foolish would they have felt
if they hadn’t conformed and the dam had, in fact, burst? Is conform-
ity good or bad? In its simplest sense, this is an absurd question. But
words do carry evaluative meaning. Thus, to be called an individual-
ist or a nonconformist is to be designated, by connotation, as a
“good” person. The label evokes an image of Daniel Boone standing
on a mountaintop with a rifle slung over his shoulder, the breeze
blowing through his hair, as the sun sets in the background. To be
called a conformist, in our culture, is somehow to be designated as
an “inadequate” person. It evokes an image of a row of bureaucratic
men dressed in gray flannel suits, carrying identical briefcases, look-
ing as though they had been created by a cookie cutter.
But we can use synonymous words that convey very different im-
ages. For individualist or nonconformist we can substitute deviate;
for conformist we can substitute team player. Somehow, deviate does
not evoke Daniel Boone on the mountaintop, and team player does
not evoke the cookie cutter–produced bureaucrat.
When we look a little closer, we see an inconsistency in the way
our society seems to feel about conformity (team playing) and non-
conformity (deviance). For example, one of the bestsellers of the
1950s was a book by John F. Kennedy called Profiles in Courage,
wherein the author praised several politicians for their courage in re-
sisting great pressure and refusing to conform.To put it another way,
Kennedy was praising people who refused to be good team players,
who refused to vote or act as their parties or constituents expected
them to. Although their actions earned Kennedy’s praise long after
the deeds were done, the immediate reactions of their colleagues
were generally far from positive. Nonconformists may be praised by
historians or idolized in films or literature long after the fact of their
nonconformity, but they are usually not held in high esteem at the
time by those people to whose demands they refuse to conform.This
observation receives strong support from a number of experiments in
social psychology. For example, in a classic experiment by Stanley
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Schachter, several groups of students met for a discussion of the case