Why We Think We Are Thinking For Ourselves When We’re Actually Not?

How many times in your life you’ve been defending a thought, wholeheartedly, without even knowing where it actually came from?

It’s not that you do not believe it or something, you actually do, but what you don’t do, is that you never ask yourself about the truth of it. You never question where it came from, and never stop to think if it’s true to you or not.

One of the most prominent concepts in social psychology is called “conformity”, which means: People change their behaviors, actions, attitudes, or perspectives in order to match the ones held by a group they belong to or are willing to fit in.

In other words, conformity means people are actually going to follow the crowd and adopt their group’s perspectives just so they’ll be accepted by its members, even if those perspectives are not what they truly believe in deep down.

Solomon Asch is a Gestalt psychologist, among his studies in social psychology he studied the conformity concept in a couple of well-designed experiments. One of the most known experiments was conducted to see if people will conform to social pressure and choose the clearly incorrect answer just because every other group member did. Using a line judgment task, Asch put one student with seven other participants in a group, and they agreed in advance on what the answer will be. The participants were introduced to one line and had to choose the most similar line out of three other lines stated as A, B & C. Clearly, the correct answer was C, but as all seven participants chose line A in the experiment, the other student agreed with the group members in almost 75% of time.

After the experiment, most of the students said they did not actually believe their answer was right, but they conformed to avoid looking ridiculous. Asch has concluded from these experiments that people tend to conform for two main reasons, the first is their desire to fit in the group which is also called normative influence, and the second is the belief that the other group members are more informed than they are which is stated as informative influence.

The main point of stating Asch’s work is basically to shed light on the fact that we are most likely a result of other people’s thoughts, perspectives, and behaviors and what they tend to all agree on. Who we grow to become has a great dependence on the society we were born into, the family we were raised by, where we were born, when, to what country, region, and all of the other communities we had to take part in while growing up, like schools, colleges, friendships, and even our social status and religion had their own effects too.

We as human beings are blindly behaving and perceiving life in one way in which we subconsciously believe it to be true, but if we stand for a second and try to think about all of the things we were raised to believe in with no doubt and asked ourselves why do we believe in them, we might not have logical answers instead of the casual one we often use in those situations; that’s what people say.

But what people say isn’t always the truth, your truth. If you’d stop and ask yourself about your behaviors, beliefs, and perspectives, would you be willing to agree with them wholeheartedly and 100%? If so, then there’s nothing else you can do, you’re being true to yourself. But if not, and I’m pretty sure 99% of the population is not, then try to think about what you truly believe, deep deep down. I bet you know all the answers.

Ps, do not try to convince yourself of your current beliefs based on the ideas they’ve tried to convince you in the first place. You know you’ll get nowhere with those ideas.

Love,